Got curious how PayPal works. This video is pretty good. Alternatives back in 2000. 1) Mailing check. Slow. Potential loss or fraud 2) Bank wire. Need to disclose bank account details which one may not want to. Domestic wire took 1-2 days, longer for international. Digital banking was less accessible. High fees. 3) Punching in credit card numbers. was not facilitated to all sellers by eBay (Grok). Hence PayPal was the best P2P wire solution. Make a PayPal account, link debit/credit card or bank account. And PayPal would handle the transaction. Since eBay provides a messaging function btw buyer and seller, they can wire via PayPal code. No need for PayPal to be supported natively on eBay – although it was supported, facilitated, then bought-out by eBay later on. No need to exchange card/bank details. What could the banks have done? Coordinate hundreds of international banks to start including email as a unique identifier. Meaning having to contact all existing clients to provide an email & verify it. Being agile enough to make the email wire system supported by websites in a seemless, integrated manner. e.g. when Bank email transfers via eBay becomes a thing, be collectively agile enough to introduce more features such as automatic payment requests for the ease of users. Deal with a blow in revenue from traditional wires. In other words, impossible. Banks were not in the position to support this. Visa/Mastercard may have missed out. Grok says they focused on merchant to consumer transactions. Requiring merchant accounts, which sellers on eBay often lacked. Ultimately it failed to provide a user friendly way for P2P transactions. Also banks and credit card companies had clearer regulations already in place, meaning greater opportunity cost. Startups like PayPal and X.com could afford to take more risks.