I used pre-paid visa cards before to activate my current and previous paypals, and your balance of $20 will not show up on paypal itself.

You see, your paypal account is like its own separate "wallet" of its own; despite any cards or bank accounts you link to paypal, paypal's website will not actually show your available balance of your cards and bank accounts. Paypal allows you to USE your credit card or bank account to pay for something, but doesn't actually have your money from the cards or bank accounts in it.

In other words, you can link your visa card to paypal, but you must log into the website of your visa card to check the balance on your visa card. Paypal merely acts as a "middleman" so to speak, like a wire that you can use to transfer your money to another person without giving them your credit card info. Paypal exists as a way to make paying and receiving payments easier, but has no actual association with your card or bank.

You can transfer money that is inside of your bank account to your paypal account balance, and vice versa, but it requires a fee and a few days to process.

And I would certainly recommend verifying your account; with a verified account you can pretty much do anything, but if you have an unverified account a lot of limits and restrictions are put on hold for what you can/can't do on paypal. I think this includes a spending/receiving limit and other things. I'm not sure if this has changed since it's been years, but years ago I remember that when I had an unverified paypal, I couldn't send payments to anyone, only receive them. I didn't have a bank account so all of my money was essentially "stuck" in my paypal account and couldn't go anywhere.

thanks for the usefull information, then .. gonna verify my paypal because I can only send money

I did kinda the same thing sinnoh did with the gift cards, and like you I also just set up my paypal account.

You have to verify it so that paypal can authorize that you are the person making the purchases basically. It's federal law or somth.
It's a pain but just do it, it's not a huge deal in the end.

I think I can give you a couple of tips that you may already know but!~

Verified Accounts are much easier to work with and lift some of the would be waiting periods and other annoyances. But if I recall correctly you must validate the account with a bank account (possibly a VISA account works as well; I used my bank info)

Your PayPal balance doesn't reflect your VISA balance or Debit balance. It reflects how much money you currently have tied up with PayPal. Like if someone pays you 10$ with PayPal the balance would first appear in your PayPal account as being credited 10$. To move it your private banking/VISA you need to manually do it through PayPal. However if you go and use PayPal to pay a bill or product/service it will first spend any money in the PayPal balance before dipping into Debit/Credit (unless you explicitly tell it to pick from a source)

That's it, for non-merchant accounts. Which is another game entirely :3

Hope that helps!