It is, as you say, ridiculous that you can send payment to anywhere in the world and paypal would not have a clue if you were paying for a purchase or whatever you were buying. That in itself suggests opacity, which is the point I am trying to make.
I do not blame PayPal or Ebay, BitCoin or the United States Postal Service for my son's fascination with and high risk behavior where drugs were concerned. It has come to the attention of policy makers in this country that PayPal, Ebay, BitCoin and the USPS are in fact augmenting the distribution of narcotics (see recent Wall Street Journal article that describes especially the role of the USPS) My son had a horrible problem that we were not able to help him with through love, reasoning, interventions, family therapy and even having the police raid his apartment. He nonetheless graduated with honors in economics and engineering from one of the most difficult schools in the country, held a responsible high-paying job, traveled the world, and was beloved and revered by his friends and family.
I gather from your confirmation bias that my opinion will probably go unheeded, but in fact the entities named above are involved, albeit unintentionally, in the trafficking of narcotics, and are all too willing to look the other way. One hundred twenty nine people are dying from substance overdose in this country every day, the majority of involving fentanyl which is extraordinarily potent. It is much easier to smuggle into the country than other substances because many doses occupy such a small volume. It is coming from China, India and Mexico, often paid for via PayPal, often shipped via USPS and killing people left and right.
If you like living in an "anything goes" world, and you think people should be able to access deadly substances with relative ease, and businesses have no ethical obligations, then PayPal is your kind of business. For my part, I'd like to think the world could be better than that.
