Paypal doesn't serve many countries. Has high fees. Can arbitrarily lock you away from funds or freeze accounts. Censors Transactions. Banking law does not apply as they are a transmitter, not a bank. Many many reasons not to PayPal.
If you look into the reason for each of those constraints, you'll find that any cryptocurrency exchange will eventually have to face the same challenges.
I think it was Hector-Garcia Molina who used to talk about how NoSQL proponents were so excited about the scale benefits, but just hadn't yet realized that they need ACID, normalization, etc.. That's who cryptocurrency advocates remind me of. Just because some features are superior currently, doesn't mean those features are consistent with future, inevitable constraints.
On the other hand, Europe broadly has better ways to transfer money. For example, anyone with a mobile banking app can transfer money to anyone else who's registered their mobile number with their bank - even completely separate banks - near-instantly, with an hour's delay in extreme cases, in the UK. And I often hear that other countries have significantly better infrastructure than us.
There is huge potential with what Ripple is doing, and their technology very much has a lot to do with ACH and cash settlement. Apologies if I was being an ass. I'm just really excited about Ripple and how I think their technology can transform the entire electronic movement of money. No more waiting days for cash to settle... it literally takes seconds. It's pretty amazing to see it in action.
You are so right, Ripple is one of the only companies trying to revolutionize how payments work by creating interoperability between different payment networks and working with banks. What they are trying to do is extremely ambitious... if they can pull it off then oh man, not sure what to say. It's like trying to predict Facebook pre internet.....
