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There was, however, one crucial component missing in our virtual office: a decent tool for online payments. And we had to do a lot of online payment processing; paying staff and accepting payments from our sponsors being the two most important. The closest we got to a viable tool was PayPal, but we quickly learned to avoid it.

PayPal’s fees for international payments were (and still are) exorbitant. What we ended up using was the international banking system, SWIFT. It was full of red tape, the bank’s online software was buggy, and often we found that one or more intermediary banks had taken a chunk of money during the process.

In short, the banking system was opaque and frustrating… but even then it was better than PayPal.

[From

Bitcoin, Online Payments and the Scourge of PayPal – BayPay Members Blogs

]

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The EU Commission on Tuesday will pledge to investigate the suspiciously high number of the notes in circulation in the eurozone as part of a plan to choke-off financing for terrorists in the wake of November’s attacks in Paris.

From EU to probe €500 notes’ links to terrorism – FT.com

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