Was paypal a good or terrible option to buy bitcoin in the early days of exchanges?
Being a gateway payment system does not make it a perfect one because it's a centralized one and anything with them can come in the same way any other commercial banks operates, though in the early days, people never knew or let me say lack the full awareness of the different ways by which they can engage the use of p2p, instead some will just go straight to them to make buy and later considered having issues related on that, they have locations barriers and nothing about you and your purchase is safe with them, the privacy is also zero.