Could PayPal introduce their own currency?

Posted by stuart as

I checked my Visa card statement this morning, and discovered what I thought was a suspicious transaction. It turned out that the transaction was fine, it was for the advertising on a blog I had purchased throught performancing partners.

What did strike me as odd was the amount (in Australian dollars) which had been withdrawn. It seemed to me that something was wrong, and when I did my sums, it turned out that the amount charged to my card was a couple of dollars more than my USD to AUD would have made the sum.

It’s all water under the bridge now, as there’s not much I can do about it, but it did get me thinking about the next logical step in the world of online purchases.

PayPal dollars.

Before you fall off your chair laughing, stop and think about it for a minute. If you do any kind of business online, you use paypal, probably on a daily basis. But there’s two things missing from the service:

1. The ability to do business with Goolge (AdSense and AdWords) using paypal
2. The complete pain in the ass which is currency conversions if you live outside North America, considering most transactions online are done in US dollars or Euros.

Consider the benefits of a universal currency, all incomings and outgoings are in a single currency. Sure, there’d need to be a conversion at some stage, if you’re outside the US and withdrawing money from your paypal account to your bank account, but if the paypal dollar was calculated against the US dollar, you’d know exactly what you were getting when you withdrew your money.

Do you see this as something we could be seeing in the future?