> PayPal survives because they keep end users happy, we (the people using PayPal to take payment or integrating it) aren't the end user.

I have no clue where you get that idea. PayPal was freezing end-users accounts, had a bad support and very inconsistent refund limits since forever. Almost everyone I know who heavily used it had issues with it at some point in time.

Yeah as long as you just use PayPal once a year to make some payment through your debit card it's okay, but any advanced user who use it more often will eventually get in trouble.

PayPal generally these days doesn't get hacked. As an alternative to supplying credit card number to a random online merchant, it is infinitely more secure.

I have no doubts about security and avoid giving my card credentials to random merchants it's exactly my use case for PayPal, but I still got account randomly locked several times over 10 years.

What exactly caused it I have no idea, but might be traveling or using VPN. Once I tried to make fairly big $2000 transaction to pay for my new laptop and spent a week re-verifying my identify with them.

There's really no good reason for anybody to be asking people for their credit card number any more. 3-D Secure exists and all the major schemes have implementations.

Given two merchants, I'll choose the one that uses a credit card over paypal every day. At least with a credit card I've my bank _and_ the scheme on my side. With paypal, it's me (and my bank) against the world ...

PayPal user since 2012, multiple monthly recurring transactions, about a dozen total transactions per month. Have cashed out bitcoin multiple times through Coinbase. Never had a problem.

Far less issues than I’ve had with my bank actually (random declines, locked out of my account due to technical issue) in the same number of years.

Lucky you. Other people have had very different experiences.

These new-monopolies all seem to have the same features: robo-traps that trigger problems for users, robo-support (or support-by-script) that doesn't solve the problems, and no apparent motivation to actually solve problems when they happen.

Stronger regulation might fix some of this, but generally there should be some obligation to act ethically and responsibly.

(I know I'm dreaming, but consider how we got to the point where this requirement might as well be science fiction instead of a realistic consumer expectation.)