Quote from: Medusah on Today at 06:13:42 PM

Quote from: legiteum on Today at 05:45:24 PM

That $20 chargeback fee is still cheaper than what you'd pay for the necessary Bitcoin transaction to send the money back in that situation.

In Paypal, you're paying for administrative time and the legal situation around the chargeback. In Bitcoin, you're paying for the legal situation only, if there is any. If a chargeback for a low-value item is requested, the merchant is encouraged to accept it.

Again, the situation is exactly the same whether the means of transaction was PayPal, Bitcoin, a credit card, or an envelope with some paper bills. Some actual humans need to be involved in a merchandise return situation, which costs a business money to deal with.

There are probably other services other than PayPal that deal with this cheaper, but in any case you are not paying for the price of PayPal's servers to move a few rows in their database around, you are paying for human beings to deal with a customer service problem.

Quote from: legiteum on Today at 05:45:24 PM

And through all of this, we've been talking about the old, slow, outdated system known as "PayPal'. The future is pure digital currencies that are not based on blockchain.

Could you clarify the distinction between a centralized digital currency and Paypal? From what I understand, they appear to be essentially identical, just labeled differently.

[/quote]

A digital currency is a... digital currency, e.g. like Bitcoin, or Ether, or Haypenny. Digital currencies are digital tokens that maintain their value by virtue of one's possession of it, as opposed to one's identity like as in a bank or credit card or PayPal etc. Digital currencies allow value transfer without an exchange of personal information. For instance, here is 1M USDE (non-negotiable) in DollHairs: gmBe00H5TVgD1XiA6tOEPR. Put that into your Haypenny wallet, and you have the Doll Hairs (see how fun this is?

).

It's worth noting that lots of blockchain-based digital currencies (aka cryptocurrencies) are defacto centralized since they don't have a broad dispersal of servers, or don't have very many servers. Indeed, probably most cryptos could be taken over fairly easily by a central entity, which makes them only "temporarily" decentralized. And there's lots of debate over whether Ether and others are "really" decentralized since there is so much control over these systems by a single company.

(And I'll be wondering how long before somebody claims those Doll Hairs

).