Google CEO Confirms Online Payment System

didde writes "Reuters is reporting on statements that Google's CEO Eric Schmidt had made regarding Google's upcoming payment system. Apparently they're not looking to compete with PayPal." From the article: "Schmidt said Google does not intend to offer a 'person-to-person stored-value payments system' like PayPal's, in which money briefly resides in PayPal's control during the transaction, but he did not give details of how the Google system would differ."

Comments

Global coverage?

[kkumer]

Well, one improvement over PayPal would be global coverage. Just few days ago I was very impressed by a nice piece of software (mp3splt, BTW), and I decided to donate some money to the corresponding Sourceforge project via PayPal. Half way through I found out that my small European country (Croatia), was not covered by PayPal services.

How is that any different?

[Otto]

Converting real cash into fake cash gives the fake cash a real value and thus makes it into real cash.

In other words, if I buy a Gbuck and send it to a friend and they convert it back to whatever it is worth in cash, how is this any different than what paypal does, realistically?

If they create their own currency and decide not to tie it in a fixed way to another currency, then that's interesting, but doesn't change the fact that it's still them accepting one currency for a temporary period of time.

It also introduces the problem of fluctations of the new currency. People buy Gbucks, wait for them to be worth more real bucks, then cash out. Google is now out a ton of real cash. This is done with real cash all the time, but making it easy to convert between currencies will make this simpler. Only way to combat this that I can see is for google to implement a conversion fee to stabilize the fluctuations, which will discourage the currency from taking off in the first place.