So recently I came across a few things with regard to Paypal that people may be able to use. I've been using it to repay a loan from my father and it's working rather well; no stamps or dead trees involved.
First, if you keep a balance in Paypal and sign up for the money market, they give one of the best rates on the web. Right now it's a bit low, under 3%, but I've seen it as high as 4.5% if I recall correctly. The basic idea is that they want you to keep your money with them so that it costs them nothing to move it around.
Second, they have a debit card you can apply for (see link below). The way this works is that it takes money out of your Paypal account, as if they were a bank (they are one in Europe, actually). There appears to be a way to use the Balance Manager to automagically draft from a backup funding source when balance dips below a certain limit. In fact, if you use the debit card as a credit card (i.e. you sign but don't use a PIN), then the merchant ends up paying 2.5+% in charges for the credit card processing due to Visa fees, and since they process it all they refund 1% of the purchase price (not the fee) to you. Basically it's a win-win situation. You can't write checks on it, but despite that I have some friends who use Paypal as their only financial institution.
Debit CardNOTE: You have to go through a process to enroll for 1% back:
You can now pay someone you're talking to on Skype. Skype is free, and does video conferencing; I've never used this but you can click a menu option and pay the person as though you were meeting them face-to-face.
It's easy to create a button for people to send you money. I have one for the users of my server to donate with. The HTML is quite easy to write, it takes just a minute or two. The only downside is that spammers who scour the web will find that email address in the form's hidden field, so I've had to add a spamtrap address to the page.
My Donation PageI haven't used this, but it looks like you can create credit cards that can only be used by one merchant. This is great when you don't trust the security of the web site; if it's stolen, it's no good to anyone else.
Here's a Windows-only plug-in that makes it easy.
As far as I know, nobody's ever lost money due to a break-in on the site; it has, to my knowledge, all been related to phishing attacks and such. If you go to the link below, you can get a security fob for $5 that makes it much more difficult to use a stolen password:
Further, if you have your account misused, it is fraud, and you are entitled to your money back. Many people think that money taken from bank accounts is irrecoverable; that's only true if it's true; legally, you have every right to get it back and financial institutions have asset recovery teams that do this. Only if the funds are paid in some untraceable, irreversible way - such as cash or Western Union - is it difficult to trace and return. That's why there's a delay on getting money out of most financial systems.
Furthermore, I've met a person who had a paypal account opened with their personal & banking information - they never actually opened it. The fraudster also used that info to do a lot of other things, but he said that Paypal was the easiest company to work with - he told them it was fraudulent, Paypal's customer support did some checking and said, yeah, you live in Texas not Utah, here's your money back, and they were presumably going after the woman in Utah.
They don't advertise this, but by and large, if it looks like fraud, Paypal eats the losses. It doesn't matter whose fault it is - even if you gave your account info to phishers - they refund it. There may be limitations - the account fine print is long and complicated - but according to an employee in customer account protection, they almost always make you whole.
If you've found this useful, let me know; I'll forward on any other tricks I come across.