>They've already screwed up and screwed people over publicly dozens of times.

Dozens of times means absolutely nothing considering the billion that uses them.

Do you many how many thousands of times banks and insurance companies actually screw people -- and yet nobody bats an eye?

Besides the big assumption is that this is due to PayPals incompetence or malice, and not due to BS regulations (that anybody else will have to follow too).

They probably mean either big screw ups, or hundreds of thousands of little ones. Eg, trying to circumvent banking laws, allowing donations to the KKK while refusing to cater to wikileaks, seizing funds from well known legitimate businesses, UX anti patterns (eg fake endorsements from the site), Braintree not understanding why you'd want to use CSP to stop someone stealing credit card details, etc.

I don't want to victim blame, but if you work in tech, and still involve PayPal in your business in any way you shouldn't be surprised about the outcome. Use Stripe, use GoCardless. Paypal Has To Go®.

And I think that "shouldn't be surprised" is what ultimately threatens to kill Paypal.

I wouldn't ever use Paypal as a primary or exclusive channel for a startup, and I'm not alone. It may not become publicly hated, but if companies end up too scared to give it traffic, it will still die.

Younger kids might not remember how incredibly painful it was to do credit card transactions in the 1990s. It wasn't just filling out a form or getting a bank to agree to it. Being told "monitor what your users upload in exchange for 3%" would have been something to kill for.

Exactly - for a great deal many people, PayPal is preferable to paying directly to the seller. Until another branded payment provider has that level of mindshare across the general populace, and seen as being secure and trustworthy from twentysomethings to grandparents, then they wont be beaten.

But will companies continue to run the risk of letting Paypal ban their accounts (and often, freeze their funds in the process)?

I can't imagine a consumer revolt, but at a certain point "makes your users feel secure" is outweighed by "makes you terrified you'll lose your money". I suspect that something like Stripe or Square will eventually sell companies on a "we won't screw you over" narrative and start to compete directly.

Probably. At this stage, the integration with PayPal is as much for the user's benefit as it is the company's (Stripe has an easier integration path, and is elegant from a back end perspective), and it isn't the customers concern that a supplier might have their account frozen. We're looking at this from a company/developer perspective, but that's not the driver for it any more.

> They've already screwed up and screwed people over publicly dozens of times.

If that's the standard, there likely isn't a single major corporation that'd meet it.

Most large companies work hard to keep customers happy because the competition is down the street. PayPal benefits from barriers to entry and a two sided market to make this less of an option for merchants.