PayPal has to deal with regulations in over 190 different countries and who knows how many different state, provincial and local regulatory bodies around the world. It is actually very surprising how much one can do with PayPal given the worldwide regulatory exposure they have.

Buried in the fine print of PayPal's Acceptable Use Policy are all kinds of moralistic restrictions.  Some examples:

1) No porn
2) No gambling (lotteries, online poker etc)
3) No weapons
4) No firearms, ammunition or firearm parts
5) No items "considered obscene" (whatever that means - up to them I guess)

I absolutely detest PayPal telling me what I can do with my money but unfortunately there aren't any real (i.e. widely accepted) alternatives.  I've run into the part regarding firearm parts.  They'll freeze your account without warning; good luck getting your money out after that.

That's why we all need to get away from PP as far as possible..

Or maybe they just should stand against some law regimes.
f.e move its seets to Dubai etc.

I'm no lawyer, but freezing an account for 6 months without the client having access to his funds, I frankly do not understand how that can be legal in any jurisdiction. I haven't counted all the lawsuits, but apparently from what I've heard, PayPal have lost quite a lot of those.

Also, it depends what kind of 'connections' you have within PayPal, if you're just an ordinary average Joe with no special connections, I'm afraid they can do basically whatever they want to your account.

For some small companies, having their PayPal account frozen could actually means they're going out of business. Here's an interesting read:

http://indie-games-ichiban.wonderhowto.com/blog/paypal-problems-strike-yet-another-indie-developer-0130483/

It appears to me that any game developer that wants to fund his game with donations, should use bitcoin, as it would be an excellent way to transfer funds over the internet, with no threat of anyone freezing your funds. Obviously many people don't know bitcoin, but if game developers started to mention bitcoin and asking for bitcoin funding, then more people would learn about bitcoins and get bitcoins.

In my personal opinion, any freezing of an account should be sorted out as quickly as possible, and certainly not be allowed to go on for 180 days. I can't imagine how apeshit pissed I would've been if that ever happened to me. So just to make sure, I don't use PayPal.

I've used PayPal quite a bit but amazingly never bought or sold anything on eBay.

We're currently in a legal battle about this, lawyers and all. Trust me, its not as easy as it sounds.

But before blaming PayPal has anyone asked the question why? In particular how different laws and regulations impact a company like PayPal. Lets take the US and the UK for example. To do business in the US one has to ban gambling. In the UK one has to ban guns. Now to do business in both the US and UK one has to ban both gambling and guns. The more places one wants to do business the more things one has to ban and restrict.

Every evil bitch story about paypal makes Bitcoin and alternative payment platform stronger and stronger...until we reach critical mass of anger. Then it's too late.

Their audience is going to need to be familiar with bitcoin in order for it to work really well. Yeah, it's a chicken and egg problem.