Oh paypal, and the love and hate relationship

So I was trying to send a payment to someone in GBP earlier today. Which, in general, seems like an easy task, right? Well, yes. And yet, by the end of the day it can be way more expensive than you'd expect.

Let me give a theoretical situation, which actually isn't theoretical at all. Someone recently sent me 170 USD; because of the recent changes is paypal, it tries to send me the money in EUR by default, unless the sender changes it manually. So instead of 125 USD I got a converted amount in EUR without asking for it - which was 146.06 EUR after the automatic conversion fee and the receiving fee. Today I needed to make a payment of GBP 80. As I didn't have pounds on my account right now, I thought I can use some USD I have on my account. There would be another conversion fee, I'm aware of that, but...obviously, automatically it only allows me to transfer from my EUR account, which will equal EUR 96,65. Yes, I could exchange the USD to GBP manually myself, which I did. But before I thought about it, paypal didn't even give me the option to use the USD, and would have rather me pay the conversion fees from the same money multiple times.

So let's imagine I would have done it the way paypal wanted me to. How much would I have lost all together from fees and currency conversions and everything else based on the initial 170 USD, using the today's currency rates.

170 USD - 80 GBP = EUR 66.85 according to Google.

Now, let's see what's the actual from Paypal.

170 USD = EUR 146.06
80 GBP = EUR 96.65
EUR 146.06 - EUR 96.65 = EUR 49.41

By the end of the day Paypal is charging me 10% for their service. I'm not really the complaining type....hmm, or maybe I am, but this is simply ridiculous.