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.
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.
Right. And with Bitcoin if someone steals my wallet and spends all the coins in it I'm screwed. No recourse. All my money is gone. With Credit cards I'm not liable and all my money is still there.
So you are willing to shift the responsibility for your carelessness on other agents in the market who had nothing to do with your poor security decisions and terrible luck ?
:-P
Bitcoin shifts damage exclusively to the consumer. I have no economics background, but aren't there more consumers then merchants? Aren't merchants themselves consumers? PayPal is not a perfect system. Bitcoin does not offer improvements to the consumer- just to the seller.
Well, it seems to me that it's not a question of "who has more numbers" but a question of incentives such a set-up creates.
Shifting all the damages to merchants penalizes fair merchants and mildly annoys (at best) scammers
Shifting all the damages to the consumer does penalize a careless / inexperienced consumer, but in the end a consumer has more ways to do due diligence on a merchant than a merchant on a consumer (online merchants are, by necessity, somewhat static, while online consumers typically are pretty ephemeral)
To me, chargebacks are obviously a corrupt system that creates perverse incentives
Also, nothing in principle prohibits various "fraud insurance" schemes (including ones I would consider "perverse"
) from arising, but, due to bitcoin's transparency (paradoxically, bitcoin is perhaps by far the most transparent online payment system, since everyone can view everyone's transaction log)BTW, transparency is one more notable feature of bitcoin - you can go and take a look how your transaction is "moving around" in Block Explorer, which might have a lot of uses.
Also, Googled and looked into bitcoin-police. It looks very new- two posts on a blog, wiki with a lot of info on the mybitcoin scandal. Have they successfully helped anyone recover funds? Or at least, brought any bitcoin scammers to some form of justice?
Everything about bitcoin is by necessity young.
Also, bear in ming that new functionality is being developed and tested (check out multicoin, it's amazing)
My carelessness? Again, I'm Joe Average, but I have some standards I try to follow. If i'm looking at an online store that I have never used before, I look for a contact us page first- But I've seen more then a fair share of sites that don't have anything other then an email address. Then I look around for reviews- but what if the site is only a year old? Or how do I judge reviews? Astroturfing is a fear with anything that has too many 5 star reviews. I've seen more then one site that I waffled forever on if it looked or felt legitimate.
Now put this in terms of bitcoin where a lot of these merchants are six months to a year old. Oh, it's easy enough to identify a scammer once they've taken someones money and run, but until then... I don't know what you consider DD with just opened Bitcoin merchants.
And Bitcoin- if it is as anonymous as people say, has the incentive for long haul scams. I'm really not going to discuss the mybitcoin accusations- but the fact that people think it's possible someone started an exchange, waited a long while, before making off with a large sum of coins. Even if that's not what happened here, what's to stop it from happening in the near future?
Because BTC can be used to buy goods or services that normally wouldn't be obtainable online through paypal, etc.
A.K.A , the reason why a lot of people get into BTC in the first place...
A.K.A , the reason why a lot of people get into BTC in the first place...
This doesn't really appeal to me. I am understanding this as products/services that are illegal. While I have my own opinions about the laws involved, I don't think going to Bitcoin to use the net to circumvent them is a good idea. Bitcoin is anonymous, but still has transparent transactions. Also, if this is really the driving force of Bitcoin, it tarnishes the image of any legitimate merchants considering using it.