That's even worse than engaging in presales! It's practically fucking gambling the way you describe it, why the fuck would Paypal be enticed by that subtle shift in framing?
Yeah, it's "gambling" the way donating to an artist you like is gambling.
And who's trying to entice them? Again, if doing business with Indiegogo projects is incompatible with Paypal's risk profile they shouldn't do business with Indiegogo projects. That seems straightforward.
Bizarre to think we should be sympathizing with, enticing, or otherwise fellating PayPal in this situation.
Bizarre to think we should be sympathizing with, enticing, or otherwise fellating PayPal in this situation.
While I understand how easy it is to sympathize with the merchant here, as none of us will ever be payment processors, the reality is that the sum of your suggestions or assertions, if explored just as a thought experiment, quickly lead to a world where nobody can do payment processing without imposing absurdly high fees. Of course we can all see how unfair it seems to have all this money promised by seemingly wide-eyed and clear-minded open source software supporters. But Paypal has millions of clients and has to act in a way that generalizes across all of them, and which requires the least amount of trust to be placed in those clients. The only argument that Mailpile has is "but we're not evil," which is true, but still insufficient.
The other thing is, things don't work like that in the real world. If you go to court over this, the judge will check the material evidence (for example, that MailPile's page says they will deliver a beta by Jan2014) and will want to know if that was delivered.
