The well-known international payments processor, PayPal has been making a lot of changes to its way of operation since it separated from eBay. One of the recent changes made to its Taiwan operations prevent PayPal users in the region to either send or receive funds from other users in the region.
Since PayPal spun off eBay in July this year, the new company is cleaning up its books and redefining its operations across the globe. This exercise comes with an initial cost, which will definitely pay off in the later stages of its operations. The recent move by PayPal Taiwan to prevent Taiwanese users from using their local personal PayPal account to send and receive funds from other local users.
By doing so, PayPal is adhering to the regulations on digital payments put forth by the Taiwanese government. This new restriction on the platform will come into effect in the next ten days. These restrictions are currently applicable only for transactions happening within the geographical boundaries of Taiwan. All international transactions over PayPal will continue to be unaffected.
With peer-to-peer transactions out of question on PayPal, people in Taiwan and even Puerto Rico (as PayPal has issued similar restrictions as Taiwan) will now have to depend on other fund transfer services operational in the country to do so. As these regulations regarding peer-to-peer local fund transfer are applicable to fiat currency, bitcoin and other digital currency platforms exhibit themselves as an ideal alternative to meet the requirements.
Taiwan has a decent bitcoin community where users can always pick up bitcoin from their neighborhood store. MaiCoin, a Taiwan based bitcoin exchange has been instrumental in introducing over the counter sale of bitcoin across the country. With bitcoin conveniently available in supermarkets and other shops, people can now easily use MaiCoin or other bitcoin wallet service in place of PayPal to transfer funds.
This has set the stage for MaiCoin to encash upon the current circumstances and gain more users who are interested in sending money over the internet to others living in the same territory. However, it is up to MaiCoin to decide upon the way to do so.