> Easier - the credit card process is already about as easy as is possible Credit cards requires giving a physical card to someone when ordering offline, or ty

> Easier - the credit card process is already about as easy as is possible Credit cards requires giving a physical card to someone when ordering offline, or typing a series of numbers when ordering online. There's a lot of room for improvement with Bitcoin. In addition to that, Bitcoin can make some less standard payments easier, like splitting a payment between multiple users, using an arbiter for the transaction, micro payments, etc > Cheaper - the credit card process costs the consumer nothing Perhaps the consumer doesn't pay for it, but there's significant cost for the merchant that can be saved with Bitcoin. edit: which could also effect the total price the merchant is asking for, giving some of the cost reduction to the consumer > Safer - the credit card process has substantial fraud protections for the consumer, but bitcoin by design does not have those fraud protections, so I don't see any way bitcoin could ever be safer. Bitcoin doesn't have fraud protections because its outside the scope of what Bitcoin is. Its like saying that the US dollar doesn't have fraud protection. Companies can be built around Bitcoin to provide that service for a fee. In addition to that, its actually much harder to steal (locally stored [1]) Bitcoin private keys than it is to steal credit cards. When an attacker breaks into a service that accepts credit cards, he can easily copy and re-use the credit card numbers because the one accepting the payment has everything needed to make more payments. With Bitcoin, the one accepting the payments can't make more payments. An attacker has to gain access to the consumer computer that stores the private keys. In other words - gaining access to a website that has 100,000 credit cards gives you a lot of power. Gaining access to a website that received 100,000 Bitcoin payments gives you nothing. You'd have to break into 100,000 individual computers. [1] I'm assuming here that people either use local Bitcoin clients or m-of-n transaction where one key is stored locally. There are online wallets that stores private keys that creates significant security risks, but at least I have a choice as a Bitcoin user.