First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
PayPal doesn't want to get left in the dust. Square offers crypto, so even if the chance crypto really takes off for payments is small, they have a strategic disadvantage/weakness, which has now been rectified.
This is not PayPal giving in. This is PayPal's most significant defense effort against cryptocurrencies.
The basic concept of cryptocurrency is that you don't need PayPal or any company to be involved in digital money exchange.
By deciding that they are going to "support" crypto what they are doing is saying "you don't need to go use real crypto. Just buy it from us and we will handle it for you.". Which means instead of the transaction going through on the real blockchain, it goes through PayPal still. Paypal stays in the loop and gets their transaction fee. People don't own cryptocurrencies.
What we want is for Ethereum 2 and or Polkadot or whatever that is now starting to get better scaling ability to really take off and start clearing a ton of transactions per second.
It's amazing to me that people cannot see that PayPal and other banks or transaction middlemen have a fundamental conflict of interest with cryptocurrencies which aim to make them obsolete.
I think they were talking about a few million a year for Ethereum issuance.
Don't really know anything about Polkadot.
Personally I think the idea that a fixed supply solves everything is an oversimplification. I mean if you want digital gold then sure. But if you want lots of everyday transactions I am not sure it can work.
Well, a fixed supply yields better monetary properties, which people are likely to value.
I don't really think a cryptocurrency can win in the transaction niche without also winning in the store of value niche. I think it's a winner take all situation.
As a separate point, I don't know if Ethereum or Polkadot really can scale to meet the world's needs (I'm skeptical), but any cryptocurrency can scale arbitrarily if you use offchain intermediaries (e.g. like PayPal) for small transactions.
PayPal doesn't want to get left in the dust. Square offers crypto, so even if the chance crypto really takes off for payments is small, they have a strategic disadvantage/weakness, which has now been rectified.