Internet payment systems
Last updated
Last updated
confinity.com and x.com merged and created paypal.com
They enabled their users to send money peer to peer (PC to PC) directly using the internet.
An electronic wallet revolution took off (software wallets) and people could access online services which made it so much easier and cheaper to send money across big distances, around the world, instantly, without ever leaving the house.
Services like Western Union which cost a fortune and for which you had to travel to a physical location soon had fewer and fewer users. More and more people switched from services like postal money transfer, Western Union, and others as they bought computers and connected them to the internet.
The new generation of internet users would never even know what Western Union was all about. Sending money through the internet instantly was the new way of storing and transacting currency for both private individuals and commercial companies.
PayPal would become the world's biggest P2P (Peer to Peer) money transfer service which also offered a bridge for banks. Because of this bridge, PayPal was “allowed” to grow.
In essence, technology had evolved to the point where transacting globally would become much more efficient due to the adoption of the IP (the Internet Protocol) by more and more people.
Still, PayPal had many issues to solve in order to convert most of the world's people to users of PayPal. Because they failed to keep innovating, currently they are in a decline.
To this day, banks and services like PayPal can't solve many critical issues with banking because they require too much personal information from people, their fees are high for what they offer today and their system is centralized and vulnerable to hacking.
