Quote from: Lolcust on September 04, 2011, 01:19:59 PM

Well, let's see...

1) first and foremost, reversible transactions open up a wonderful new world of petty fraud, especially for companies selling digital, ephemeral products (such as ebooks, or software, or online services) because delivery of those is problematic to prove outside some pretty in-depth interpol investigation.

I can trivially buy a PDF from your online store, rip it, then claim you never delivered. Paypal specifically will nearly always side with the buyer.

As you might guess, that makes people selling digital products and services online very very sad.

Also, if you are a freelance artist, for instance, I could pay you with paypal P2P, then reverse the transaction after I receive your artistic work. Good luck proving act of delivery to Pain Pal.

2) Paypal specifically arbitrarily restricts countries to/from which transactions can be made. Since I am from [REDACTED], that sucks balls.

3) Fees for online payment systems (especially credit card ones) are relatively complex and high. Bitcoin fees are pretty low, especially if you don't need transaction to be confirmed ASAP

4) There are legitimate reasons to be unwilling to expose your personal information to some third party, for instance:

some people happen to live in police states you know. Not the kind of police state Americans like to cry about, the "they check your documents on the street, ze horar, ze horar". The kind of where you get arrested and beaten (possibly to the death), then jailed (in case you were not beaten to the death) for running an unlicensed wifi AP
After the Sony fiasco, even a legitimate customer of a legitimate business in a fluffy happy free country should think twice before exposing personal details to said business, especially so if the business is technically not subject to fluffy happy country's jurisdiction

5) Bitcoin is decentralized and thus quite resilient to local outages, be they due to State meddling, criminal agents, or natural events. That's a huge boon.

I understand that reversing charges can be used for petty fraud- but bitcoin is also vulnerable to fraud, is it not? The difference is who is the victim. With paypal, merchants have to worry about petty fraud, sure. What I'm seeing with bitcoin is the potential for the consumers to be scammed instead. At the same time, Its that much harder to deal with these scams- I'm sure fighting paypal on a reversed charge is an unpleasant, uphill battle, but if I send say, send 3k USD worth of bitcoins to someone for a custom watch that never manifests I have no recourse at all. The problem isn't with PayPal siding with customers, It's in people out to make a dishonest quick buck.

I've never paid a fee for my credit card. I've always paid the balance in full each month. Maybe I've lucked out.

I follow that you don't want others to have your personal information. I can even support that. My problem is not knowing where the money goes once it's gone. If I pay for goods that aren't provided, I want more then a bitcoin address/username to pursue matters with the seller, or to give to a law enforcement/fraud monitoring organization.

Quote from: ovidiusoft on September 04, 2011, 01:22:04 PM

Other three simple scenarios that I experienced myself with the current broken banking systems:

* Friend wants to buy some thing online - only 1 left in stock. Friend asked me for some money until his next paycheck - we were not in the same town then, so no cash option for us. Since it was a saturday, he could not buy the item then and had to pay +30% a week later.

* I wanted to send some money to a friend in another country. The fees? 30 EUR + 2%. Time? 2+ working days.

I really hadn't considered using bitcoin as an alternate to western union. I could see some potential there, were it not for the fact the people I western union money to can barely be trusted to operate an email account.

Quote from: defxor on September 04, 2011, 01:00:36 PM

Quote from: faustianover on September 04, 2011, 12:08:32 PM

I'm Joe Average. I buy things online, predominately off Amazon, occasionally Newegg or Ebay. I have a paypal account, but I rarely use it- Really, only for Ebay. Either way, I have never run into a problem with either my bank, or paypal.

As strictly a consumer you are currently paying a premium (let's say 5% on average) above what the goods could cost if Bitcoin was the payment system used since it does not rely on some of the archaic thinking that has led us to the banking system we have today.

I'm not an economist, so I don't immediately grasp what you are meaning by archaic thinking that results in higher prices. I'm assuming you don't mean anything related to processing fees for credit cards?