"half-dollar"/"50 cent piece" Was: Recovering the ROM of an IBM 5100 using OCR

[Alan Perry]

On 7/1/19 10:09 AM, William Donzelli via cctalk wrote:
>> Maybe for you. I did a group purchase of tickets for a club I am a
>> member of.  Almost everyone paid me for their tickets paid with checks.
>> I help organize motorsports events; my expenses are reimbursed with checks.
> Paypal seems to be king for this sort of thing around here.
>
Got one PayPal for the tickets. My daughter does a lot of Venmo.

A few years ago, one of the motorsports events that I help organize used 
PayPal. The entry fee was around $1000-2000 (depending on the type of 
entry) and I think we got around 50 entries that year. Most of the 
competitors pay their entry fee on the last day of the "early entry" 
deadline before the price goes up. When that happened, PayPal flagged 
the event's account and locked access to the funds in the account. They 
kept it locked until after the event was run. There was no reason for 
this; the event had been running for almost a decade with no financial 
issues. However, there are pre-event expenses that the event has to 
cover and, thanks to PayPal, it had no access to the entry fee money for 
this. If it were not for member's of the organizing committee loaning 
the event money for those expenses, the event would not have happened 
that year. So, PayPal (and, by association, any other electronic payment 
system) isn't even considered these days.

alan