The URL resolves to a full-page authentication wall, preventing access to any purported article content. No editorial substance is available to evaluate. The dominant structural feature is a restrictive paywall or login requirement, which negatively impacts the right to seek and receive information.
That feels like it would be a pretty significant blunder for stripe. Paypal is everything that stripe isn't. Legacy, confusing, slow, expensive and hidebound.
I used to live in the United States and recently moved to Germany. Using PayPal for payments is a lot more common here than Germany. In fact I connected my Uber account to my credit card via PayPal and my partner pays for a lot of things online via PayPal.
PayPal is also used for transferring money between friends and family quite frequently
Stripe is overvalued by about 10x judging by Block and PayPal.
Best case scenario: Stripe gets larger, gets bloated, slower, eats some competitors, becomes their competitors. The street presses down on their valuation as their growth races toward single digits. Congratulations.
Block is fetching ~13 times op income. PayPal is fetching ~7 times op income.
Not good. Stripe rejects anyone even close to the regulated cannabis space (with no room for appeal) but PayPal will accept these tranctions. So, this would put a non-zero amount of businesses (that don't even touch that deadly, deadly plant) in a tight spot with this monopolisation of the industry.
> Stripe hit a $159 billion valuation on Tuesday and said it was on track to reach an annual run rate of $1 billion this year.
Wow! This is the quality of reporting from CNBC? The $1B ARR number is just for Stripe's Revenue products (Billing, Invoicing, etc). That doesn't include their main business (payments-related products).
Stripe and PayPal have pretty different sets of tradeoffs. There's plenty of reasons to dislike both, but at least right now you get a choice between them. I really hope they won't merge.
What does this mean for existing users, and the features of PayPal? Which is sending money between family & friends and withdrawing money to my bank account for free.
FedNow is what has PayPal's former investors so terrified (so much so that investors don't even think PayPal warrants a double digit multiple).
No cost instant financial transfers between US financial users is coming over the next decade. The Fed has 1,400 banks onboard so far, up from 900 the prior year (that's 1,400 in two years). Half of PayPal's business goes away over the coming decade.
I have been trying to help someone in Guatemala receive payments from international tourists and PayPal seems to be the best option we've found, even though I don't like using it (horror stories about money being stranded in locked account, etc).
When Seagate (then a reputable hard drive manufacturer) purchased Maxtor (then the bottom-of-the-barrel for both price and reliability) I hoped Seagate would rehabilitate their newly acquired facilities and bring them up to the same quality.
When a company with good tech buys out a company with crap tech, they're not paying for crap tech — they're paying for the user base.
I would wager that Stripe has already put together a consumer-cash platform, and is weighing whether to deploy it as "Stripe Cash" or "Paypal 2.0". The former strategy would require a slow rollout that would compete with Paypal, Apple Cash, whatever Google and Samsung’s offerings are called… The latter branding would make them the dominant player overnight.
Someone new will arise to fill the market gap if there is demand. Saw it firsthand here with the Marijuana industry in Michigan shifting around payment providers to accept credit card transactions after it was legalized. A lot of hoops had to be jumped through. I think it still has the potential to be bad, but it does give opportunities.
I hesitate to post this here but I'm not sure Stripe hasn't become most of those things as well now. It's obviously been very successful and I'm happy for the people who built such a useful service in the early years. But I also mourn the loss of the tidy product, transparent pricing, clear documentation, and legendary support that made it exceptional back then.
It's hard to turn a sinking product around. There's a cultural problem, and those are very difficult to solve.
There's a Munger quote that I don't quite remember, but it went something like this: "When good managers are put into a terrible culture, it's the culture that wins."
Not sure about Block and Paypal, but AFAIK a good portion of transactions on Stripe are made as part of recurring subscriptions or similar. Those can't be migrated to other services easily, so for the time being Stripe will likely continue profiting from them and from the growth of whatever businesses use it for such subscriptions.
$PYPL at $40 was/is free money. Nothing stopping you from getting on the train. 8 PE is insane for a company with brand recognition and market penetration.
Similar same happened to me, but in my country. I got a virtual stripe card to pay for the conference I was supposed to attend to and the fixing of problems took like five business days
No editorial content is visible on the page to evaluate.
FW Ratio: 75%
Observable Facts
The page content consists entirely of CSS classes and styling definitions for authentication forms and modal overlays.
The page contains elements for user login, such as '.AuthForms-unlockButton'.
No substantive article text or news content is accessible without authentication.
Inferences
The structural barrier of a paywall/authentication wall actively restricts the user's access to information and opinion, which is a negative structural practice relative to the right to seek and receive information.
The page displays a full-page authentication wall, preventing access to the purported financial news article. This is a structural restriction on access to information.
build 1ad9551+j7zs · deployed 2026-03-02 09:09 UTC · evaluated 2026-03-02 10:41:39 UTC
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