Every payment method that has ever gone mainstream has had an unglamorous plumbing problem to solve first. Card payments had terminals that cost more than the counter they sat on. Online payments had fraud, chargebacks, and merchant accounts that took weeks to get approved. In each case customer demand arrived long before the infrastructure was ready to serve it.
PayPal's launch in 1998 was the first real answer to that problem online - Taking what had been a clunky, largely phone-based process and moving settlement entirely onto the internet. By the time eBay acquired the company in 2002, sending money to a stranger on the other side of the world had gone from a technical project to something you could do in a few clicks.
