Friends, I am mesmerized by Bitcoin, it's a great currency alternative and lots of innovation going around but to be honest everywhere I see people's are fearing a lot, they want to invest in bitcoin and yes they already invested but still fear is prevalent. Everybody fears and they are afraid mostly about the following:
1) What if someone hacks and steal my bitcoin.
2) What if government shut down bitcoin.
3) What if I buy something via bitcoin and the seller doesn't send me what I paid for.
This list goes on.... What do you guys have to say about it? Why so much fear around Bitcoin? is it time to centralize the Bitcoin so that we could shop freely so that we could have purchase protection just like visa and mastercard Chargeback policy. Decentralization is good but it truly sucks.
Look mate, sometimes it sucks to have your coins stolen or scammed by someone knowing that you cannot recover it. However i haven't actually been scammed once this year, because after a while you get a pretty good feel about who's a scammer and who is not.
Every payment method is a trade off between decentralization and reversibility. If you want a freer payment method, aka bitcoin, which is completely decentralized, then you're not going to be able to reverse any transactions. Paypal on the other hand is based off fiat which i don't like at all, but is reversible.
Let me answer your questions now.
1. You'd be surprised to hear that there are many more times in terms of dollars in stolen credit card funds than in bitcoins, i have never gotten my bitcoin wallet hacked.
2. Government can't do that. Bitcoin is decentralized.
3. You didn't use escrow, did you?
Decentralization is great. I would choose decentralization above reversibility anyday, especially if i'm on the other end as a seller.