> First, none of these issues are equivalent to eating cyanide in any way, shape, or form

> First, none of these issues are equivalent to eating cyanide in any way, shape, or form. The extreme melodrama of upgrading "someone's PayPal account was erroneously locked" to literally being poisoned to death is emblematic of the misjudgment of risk going on. If you're a business, yes, PayPal locking your account and freezing your funds forever , which is what they do, is tantamount to legal grievous injury or death. This happens with enough regularity that I know multiple people that this has happened to, and the risk is enough for me to never rely on PayPal or its partners for my income. You seem to understand this with the following: > Obviously nobody needs to eat a couple M&Ms, but someone who is running a business needs a way to collect money if they want to get paid. -- > Third, the level of risk is not X in 1000. These cases you hear about in headlines are more like 1 in 10,000 or 1 in 100,000. This is what I referred to by Hacker News frequently misjudging the scale of these services because they only see these negative stories posted. …