drop back to PayPal-only for payouts

[chadwhitacre]

The case for it is from #67 (comment). This ticket is for implementation.

The Case for PayPal

Gratipay already uses PayPal. We were running roughly 50% PayPal before the Gratipocalypse, and today we made 20 PayPal payouts, and 6 bank payouts. PayPal's fee is not actually that bad: 2%, capped at $1 for U.S., and $20 for non-U.S. It's simple and ubiquitous. Compared to the red nightmare that #3491 is turning into, MassPay doesn't seem that bad.

Since we already have PayPal implemented, it'd be only a little extra work on our part (just ripping out bank accounts and notifying people, basically), and it would get us out of a lot of AML work. We could work on gratipay/inside.gratipay.com#119 over the next year or so, and then maybe reapproach Transpay (#417; they seem the best-suited to help with global bank payouts). We can take our time and do this right. Not rush, and not cut corners. We've learned a lot this time around. Now we know what "right" means.

[chadwhitacre]

I've registered a separate PayPal account for Gratipay operations. There's a risk that we'll trigger a review because of that, and who knows where that will go?

I've disconnected our Citizens account from Gratipay's Gratipay account, and have connected our operations PayPal there.

[chadwhitacre]

How many people are signed up for Gratipay 2.0 with only a bank account and no PayPal?

[chadwhitacre]

55 people are signed up for Gratipay 2.0.

[chadwhitacre]

4 were rejected. 39 are approved, 9 of which (23%) have a bank account and no PayPal.

2 of the 12 unreviewed (17%) have a bank account and no PayPal. We can ask them to update before we approve them.

What do we do with the 9?

[chadwhitacre]

(I also now see two of the 39 approved who have neither a bank account nor a PayPal! Reticketed as #3577.)

[chadwhitacre]

Proposal:

• manually search for a publicly-advertised PayPal address
• use that if we find it
• use their verified email if we don't
• notify them ASAP one way or another

[chadwhitacre]

Here's my query:

    select slug
         , is_approved
         , owner
         , (select 'yes' from exchange_routes
            where participant=p.id and network='balanced-ba' and error='' 
            order by id limit 1) as
           bank_account
         , (select 'yes' from exchange_routes
            where participant=p.id and network='paypal' and error=''
            order by id limit 1) as
           paypal
      from teams
      join participants p on owner=username
       and (is_approved is true or is_approved is null)
  order by is_approved;

[chadwhitacre]

On second thought, I think we should only use the verified email we have on file for them. The risks here are that:

• We don't get their attention soon enough that they can configure PayPal to their liking.
• We get their attention but they don't like/have PayPal. A publicly-advertised PayPal mitigates this risk.

[chadwhitacre]

We should only use verified emails because then we're making fewer assumptions about where to send people's money. The worst-case scenario there is inconvenience (we sent it to the wrong address, we have to refund and resend—but it's still an address they control). The worst-case scenario with a publicly scraped email is that we send it to the wrong person.

[chadwhitacre]

To: support@gratipay.com
Bcc: [nine]
Subject:

Greetings!

You're receiving this message because you're one of the nine people who have been withdrawing money from Gratipay 2.0 directly to your bank account.

Our provider for bank payouts, Balanced Payments, is going out of business, and they stopped providing bank payouts last week. We tried pretty damn hard over the past couple months to migrate to a new provider for bank payouts, so that we could provide uninterrupted service for you, but we failed. Sorry. :-(

Our backup plan is PayPal. To maximize the chance that you receive your payout this week in some fashion, we chose to configure your Gratipay account to send money via PayPal to the verified email address we have on file for you—the one you're receiving this email on—from now on.

Please update the PayPal address on your Gratipay settings page as necessary, to ensure that we route your payouts properly starting this Thursday.

If PayPal is not a good option for you, please get in touch and let's see what we can figure out.

You've been very patient with us throughout the turmoil of the last couple months. While we can't quite say that we've fully survived the Balanced shutdown yet (due to its repercussions for us), it's a big milestone to be processing at all even though Balanced has in fact started shutting down. Thank you for believing in us as we continue rebuilding Gratipay! :-)

As always, feel free to reply here privately, or join our public discussion on GitHub.

chad
—
Chad Whitacre
Founder, Gratipay
+1-412-925-4220 (cell)