Why am I asked to pre-authorize future payments?

When you pay using PayPal, you may see a scary message about pre-authorizing future payments. This is PayPal's confusingly-worded, but typical, way of working with online stores — in this case Gumroad, which powers the Prolost Store.

What it means is that if you choose to create a Gumroad account after your purchase, and choose to save your payment information in your Gumroad account, then the next time you buy something from Gumroad, you won't have to re-enter your PayPal login information.