It is a much more lucrative and "safe" vehicle for scams than the classical ones -- stolen credit cards, counterfeit cash, phony viagra, nigerian heirlooms, penny stocks, ponzi funds, ...
Wrong. Do you even have any idea how profitable just credit card fraud is? The credit card fraud in a single year alone absolutely dwarfs the entire bitcoin ecosystem.
That is utter bullshit, please stop repeating it.
I had the numbers somewhere that I cannot find now, but from memory: commercial payments through credit cards amount to over 7 trillion dollars a year, so 11 billion dollars of fraud is 0.2% of the total. In comparison, Bitpay claims that it processed 100 million dollars of payment last year; even if you multiply by 4 to account for other bitcoin e-commerce outside Bitpay, that is still less than the MtGOX heist alone. Even if you leave MtGOX out (since, technically, it may have been "embezzlement" rather than fraud), the KNOWN scams and heists in 2013 add to several million dollars at least. So, KNOWN bitcoin fraud must already be at least 10x worse, in percentage of total e-commerce, than credit card fraud.
One reply then ignore.
So you are going to compare the CC industry that has had 55+ years to mature, with ever increasing oversight, regulation, and fraud prevention in the multi-billions of dollars per year, with Bitcoin? A brand new payment system that's only been around for 5 years and little to no industry or worldwide regulation yet?
Apples and Oranges dude. A better comparison would be to the U.S. Wildcat frontier banking system during the 1800s.