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"I can call up my card company and claim a fraudulent charge after getting the goods... It takes something like 180 days before a CC charge becomes much harder

by yyyk 7y ago

"I can call up my card company and claim a fraudulent charge after getting the goods... It takes something like 180 days before a CC charge becomes much harder for the payer to dispute, vs. bitcoin's 10 minutes for very hard and 60 minutes for basically impossible." Yes, because obviously what we need is less power to the consumer. So what if it takes you 60 minutes to get home just to test the product you just bought? Or that you can't dispute frauds that target seniors (i.e. grandma), because she won't tell you what she bought within 60 minutes but only the next time you call her? The digital nature + relative untracability + no chargebacks makes Bitcoin scammer heaven.

Jach 7y ago
I don't mind less power in exchange for not having to give up so much of my information to merchants. As someone who's sold things before I also like that bitcoin presents a tradeoff on prevalence of buyer fraud vs. seller fraud, and that if I want more power as a consumer I can opt-in to various escrow or risk-absorbing systems rather than rely on buyer-side-bias in charge disputes as a poor man's escrow. It's not optimal to use the base network for every time of transaction, sure, but that's not true of any payment system. I don't understand your grandma rhetoric. Not that scammers aren't already in heaven (especially targeting seniors) but I guess I'd be interested if you have any peer reviewed papers studying the means scammers use and how much cryptocurrency is part of the modern scammer's toolkit. (My understand was that wire transfers through western digital were the most common means of extracting payment.)
- yyyk 7y ago
  * There's no need for a tradeoff. We could just have a method of payment that gives less of your information to merchants. * You can't 'opt-in' to 'various escrow or risk-absorbing systems'. That's because these services simply do not exist at this moment at Bitcoin-land. They may well never exist or be supported by merchants. You're comparing a non-existing theoretical model against real-world working stuff. * Unfortunately, elder fraud is too rife where I live. The scammers call the elderly person, convince him/her to buy various utterly useless stuff like a rock to scare away tigers. This is almost never done in person, but by phone, and they use credit card details. At least there, there's some hope of chargebacks and a record of the transaction. Removing even those limited restraints... that's not what we need.
  - Jach 7y ago
    A bit late, but for your first point, what methods do you propose? The existing ones aren't good enough, with every merchant wanting to know as much as they can about you. In person of course cash works fine, and long ago I've mailed money orders, but neither is feasible for online. I'm glad PayPal exists and use it for some things, but of course PayPal knows all about me (I've even used their credit system before) and downstream merchants get bits of that + whatever else they require besides the money and a shipping address. (Like a phone number, though few ever try to verify them it's not an unreasonable step to try and cut down on buyer fraud. Seriously buyer fraud is huge, lots of dishonest people will buy something on ebay or wherever and then claim it never showed up, or the wrong item was received, or it was damaged, or.. all possibly perfectly normal issues that exist to help combat seller fraud, but the current tradeoff for disputes is so heavily stacked in favor of the buyer with the current systems that many times the seller can do nothing about a lying buyer except try not to deal with them again and/or require more information from the next person.) Ultimately it boils down to, without comment on the desirability of making it possible to purchase illegal goods, can your proposals match the low amount of information darknet markets require along with the low amount of friction in making a payment? (A shipping address for physical items is the maximal information needed by any party in that whole system.) For your second point, you can opt-in. Basic escrow has existed since the beginning with m-of-n signature transactions, various wallets have UIs for it. I'll just leave this here: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Multisignature https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Multisignature For "risk-absorbing systems" for merchants, those too have been around. BitPay is probably still the most popular, and it's several years old now. https://bitpay.com/ https://bitpay.com/ If you as a merchant use them, you can if you want not even bother dealing with BTC and its inherent risks at all but still accept it as a payment method. For your third point I agree (elder)¹ fraud is a problem, and that if the scammers extract payment with a CC there's at least a chance of getting some money back... but that's not the only way they extract payment. Even if you made CCs magical anti-fraud devices, there would still be unacceptably high amounts of fraud targeting these types of people, because fraud is a complex problem and the institutions most capable of addressing it systematically would rather live with its predictable costs. As such I don't think adding BTC to the mix would harm things (or help things as a BTC fanatic might try and argue) by a noticeable amount in this area. Admittedly I'm not too confident on this when applied to fraud more broadly; specifically I'm thinking of the new ransomware threat model people have had to contend with in the last few years. Overwhelmingly those attacks (not just against elders, but industrial infrastructure and so forth!) extract payment with cryptocurrencies, though sometimes they accept gift cards etc. Restricted to the elderly, more traditional computer related schemes like "coerce a phone call to a number for 'technical support' and get victim to grant remote access to their computer, 'discover' malware, have victim pay for 'fixing' it via CC/gift card/bank wire..." are still probably going to be the most common. And of course as I wrote above, by having a payment mechanism that shifts the tradeoff in fraud disputes back to the seller, we might see an increase in seller fraud, but how will that compare to the decrease in buyer fraud? ¹A not so elder relative got tricked out of $120 not too long ago, which for him is a significant chunk of change. Fraud is a multi-spectrum problem and in many respects only seems to be getting worse over time.

by yyyk 7y ago

Jach 7y ago

I don't mind less power in exchange for not having to give up so much of my information to merchants. As someone who's sold things before I also like that bitcoin presents a tradeoff on prevalence of buyer fraud vs. seller fraud, and that if I want more power as a consumer I can opt-in to various escrow or risk-absorbing systems rather than rely on buyer-side-bias in charge disputes as a poor man's escrow. It's not optimal to use the base network for every time of transaction, sure, but that's not true of any payment system. I don't understand your grandma rhetoric. Not that scammers aren't already in heaven (especially targeting seniors) but I guess I'd be interested if you have any peer reviewed papers studying the means scammers use and how much cryptocurrency is part of the modern scammer's toolkit. (My understand was that wire transfers through western digital were the most common means of extracting payment.)

yyyk 7y ago
* There's no need for a tradeoff. We could just have a method of payment that gives less of your information to merchants. * You can't 'opt-in' to 'various escrow or risk-absorbing systems'. That's because these services simply do not exist at this moment at Bitcoin-land. They may well never exist or be supported by merchants. You're comparing a non-existing theoretical model against real-world working stuff. * Unfortunately, elder fraud is too rife where I live. The scammers call the elderly person, convince him/her to buy various utterly useless stuff like a rock to scare away tigers. This is almost never done in person, but by phone, and they use credit card details. At least there, there's some hope of chargebacks and a record of the transaction. Removing even those limited restraints... that's not what we need.
- Jach 7y ago
  A bit late, but for your first point, what methods do you propose? The existing ones aren't good enough, with every merchant wanting to know as much as they can about you. In person of course cash works fine, and long ago I've mailed money orders, but neither is feasible for online. I'm glad PayPal exists and use it for some things, but of course PayPal knows all about me (I've even used their credit system before) and downstream merchants get bits of that + whatever else they require besides the money and a shipping address. (Like a phone number, though few ever try to verify them it's not an unreasonable step to try and cut down on buyer fraud. Seriously buyer fraud is huge, lots of dishonest people will buy something on ebay or wherever and then claim it never showed up, or the wrong item was received, or it was damaged, or.. all possibly perfectly normal issues that exist to help combat seller fraud, but the current tradeoff for disputes is so heavily stacked in favor of the buyer with the current systems that many times the seller can do nothing about a lying buyer except try not to deal with them again and/or require more information from the next person.) Ultimately it boils down to, without comment on the desirability of making it possible to purchase illegal goods, can your proposals match the low amount of information darknet markets require along with the low amount of friction in making a payment? (A shipping address for physical items is the maximal information needed by any party in that whole system.) For your second point, you can opt-in. Basic escrow has existed since the beginning with m-of-n signature transactions, various wallets have UIs for it. I'll just leave this here: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Multisignature https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Multisignature For "risk-absorbing systems" for merchants, those too have been around. BitPay is probably still the most popular, and it's several years old now. https://bitpay.com/ https://bitpay.com/ If you as a merchant use them, you can if you want not even bother dealing with BTC and its inherent risks at all but still accept it as a payment method. For your third point I agree (elder)¹ fraud is a problem, and that if the scammers extract payment with a CC there's at least a chance of getting some money back... but that's not the only way they extract payment. Even if you made CCs magical anti-fraud devices, there would still be unacceptably high amounts of fraud targeting these types of people, because fraud is a complex problem and the institutions most capable of addressing it systematically would rather live with its predictable costs. As such I don't think adding BTC to the mix would harm things (or help things as a BTC fanatic might try and argue) by a noticeable amount in this area. Admittedly I'm not too confident on this when applied to fraud more broadly; specifically I'm thinking of the new ransomware threat model people have had to contend with in the last few years. Overwhelmingly those attacks (not just against elders, but industrial infrastructure and so forth!) extract payment with cryptocurrencies, though sometimes they accept gift cards etc. Restricted to the elderly, more traditional computer related schemes like "coerce a phone call to a number for 'technical support' and get victim to grant remote access to their computer, 'discover' malware, have victim pay for 'fixing' it via CC/gift card/bank wire..." are still probably going to be the most common. And of course as I wrote above, by having a payment mechanism that shifts the tradeoff in fraud disputes back to the seller, we might see an increase in seller fraud, but how will that compare to the decrease in buyer fraud? ¹A not so elder relative got tricked out of $120 not too long ago, which for him is a significant chunk of change. Fraud is a multi-spectrum problem and in many respects only seems to be getting worse over time.