PayPal's odd trajectory
[PayPal founder Peter] Thiel believes his company could ultimately compete with titans like AmEx, but the prize he has in mind is bigger than a place in the Dow. He hopes to make PayPal a vehicle of geopolitical liberation. "The ability to move money fluidly and the erosion of the nation-state are closely related," he explains. With a PayPal account, anyone on the Net can transfer value with greater anonymity than they could with a Swiss bank account. Hard to tax. Harder to regulate. Nearly impossible to control.
However,
You may not use PayPal in the purchase or sale of, or receipt of donations for, any obscene or sexually oriented goods or services. You may not use PayPal to sell drug paraphernalia, as defined in 21 U.S.C. 863. To be eligible for an account, you must be a resident of the United States or one of the approved countries [...]. We use many techniques to identify our users when they register on our site. You authorize PayPal, directly or through third parties, to make any inquiries we consider necessary to validate your registration [which] may include ordering a credit report and performing other credit checks or verifying the information you provide against third party databases. [W]e will also require your SSN or TIN if you send or receive certain high-value transactions or high overall payment volumes through PayPal.(from current PayPal policies)
There is also an enormous list of prohibited PayPal uses. You really should take a look at this list, if only to see how long it is!
The last thing Peter Thiel wants is for government regulation to intrude on his business. There are solid financial reasons - complying with banking laws is expensive - but his philosophical objections are at least as strong. [...] There are reasons to doubt that Thiel will shoulder the legal risks that come with provoking powerful foreign governments. For one thing, he wants to take PayPal public, and public companies tend not to exhibit the same regulation-baiting swagger as private concerns. Whether or not PayPal realizes his vision of liberated capital, though, he has no doubt that it's inevitable."I like to think of us as being at the forefront of financial liberation," Thiel says, sipping his wine thoughtfully. "But if we didn't do it, someone else would."
(Wired, op. cit.)
Oops!
