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Hi,
PayPal is popular but you need a credit card. Those are not very popular in Europe. Expensive, unsucre and not very usefull. Most transactions are done by bank tranfer and a debet card.
A few points: -- Paypal does not require a credit card. You can make direct bank transfers as well.
Without creating a PayPal account (which I didn't want at the moment) I wasn't able to make sure if this applies to free PayPal accounts and to bank accounts outside the US. Could you please give some more information on this?
-- Credit cards are not expensive -- they are entirely free. I certainly don't pay anything at all for any of mine (and you don't pay interest if you pay your bills on time either). They're essentially the same as a debit card, but more secure (if there's a dispute with a dishonest merchant, you don't pay until the dispute is resolved, while with a debit card they already have your money, and you don't get it back until the dispute is resolved -- also by law in the US at least, the consumer is only responsible for up to $50 of credit card fraud). -- In the US at least, most debit cards work through the credit card system as well. They're treated as debit, but you can use them in a credit card reader just fine.
But credit cards just are not that common in the Euro zone -- I guess you're not familiar with money transfer systems here. E.g., a lot of operations in Germany is made via Online Banking systems at the moment, and there is also the Maestro EC debit card system used in many countries of the eurozone.
In the euro-zone you can make a bank transfer from one account to a other account in the euro-zone for the same price like a local transfer. That is almost always free.
I think that'll be possible starting in 2004? At the moment, it's not really true.
A Wikimedia euro bankaccount in euro-zone state can be usefull for donations from Europe. No need for a credit card, easy to do, no loss of mony; 1 euro donation = 1 euro for Wikimedia. Not 1 euro - x%
On the other hand, the expenses are all currently in the US, so the currency will have to be converted at some point to US$. This would also require a resident of Europe to handle the bank account and to periodically mail checks to Jimbo (or bank transfer the funds to a US account, which probably isn't free).
It depends on the number of euro zone Wikipedians and the amount of money that'll be founded by them, if this is a good idea or not. __ . / / / / ... Till Westermayer - till we *) . . . mailto:till@tillwe.de . www.westermayer.de/till/ . icq 320393072 . Habsburgerstr. 82 . 79104 Freiburg . 0761 55697152 . 0160 96619179 . . . . .