5 ms·

"which are awful, but necessary for now". I am not sure what is exactly that awful in having free credit for X days, rewards for making purchases (which effect

by piokoch 13y ago

"which are awful, but necessary for now". I am not sure what is exactly that awful in having free credit for X days, rewards for making purchases (which effectively cancels fees) and, the most important thing, chargebacks. I can understand Credit Card issues from seller point of view, but for clients (that is most of us), they are not that bad. Bitcoin will have to provide the same level of consumer comfort and safety to have wider adoption. This also touches banking system as a whole. If I make an error in my bank transfer, I will get my money back and this is up to bank to return them, I don't have to worry about this. Who will give me back my bitcoin payment done by mistake?

tomasien 13y ago
That's a good point, BTC doesn't have that figured out yet but I bet Stripe will be able to help figure that out! We handle that for ACH if you're interested.
- pbreit 13y ago
  Bitcoin does have the capability of "2 of 3" authorizations which can mitigate some of the upfront risk. The idea being that a payment only completes after 2 parties approve it, the 3rd being an independent 3rd party in this case (who could be configured to auto-approve if a complaint isn't filed in x days).
  - danielweber 13y ago
    And what stops the customer from filing a bogus complaint, same as they do now if they use a credit card?
    - pbreit 13y ago
      Getting kicked out of the system.
      - seabee 13y ago
        Only if the incentives of the third party align this way, which is very unlikely as many merchants burned by PayPal/eBay can attest to.
        pbreit 13y ago
        We used to kick chronic chargebackers out of PayPal and I would assume that still the case to some extent.
wyager 13y ago
> the most important thing, chargebacks. Chargebacks are awful. 99% of the time, the merchant is a trusted party with a reputation to uphold, and the customer is a nobody who either couldn't care less about or couldn't be held to their reputation. Established companies won't go around overtly scamming people. The only time that chargebacks are really a good thing is with the very uncommon untrusted-merchant sale (like a new seller on Ebay with little/no feedback).
- zanny 13y ago
  And in these situations it makes more sense to just use a trusted third party broker than to have it built into the transaction schema. It adds huge amounts of overhead and unpredictability to what should be simple exchange.
- gnopgnip 13y ago
  If chargebacks were not available they would happen much more often. This is evident by looking at the bitcoin community as a whole.
- Nursie 13y ago
  Even nobodies have the right to be dealt with fairly and receive their money back if the company dealing with them has fouled up. We've seen again and again in the bitcoin world that companies with truct built up can either take the money and run, or just fail miserably. Consumer protections are a god thing. Chargebacks themselves are a necessary part of the trust infrastructure you talk about. Not just for new merchants, they keep the established ones honest too.
runeks 13y ago
> Bitcoin will have to provide the same level of consumer comfort and safety to have wider adoption. I think I know what you mean by that statement, but I want to make claer that Bitcoin (the protocol) should never provide this. This is like wanting to build guarantee-of-delivery into the IP protocol. It's completely unnecessary and counter-productive. We want to preserve the ability to send funds to people where chargebacks aren't required, just as we want to be able to send data to people where guarantee-of-delivery isn't required. Stripe, BitPay, Coinbase, PayPal etc. should be the ones who choose to provide chargeback services.

by piokoch 13y ago

tomasien 13y ago

That's a good point, BTC doesn't have that figured out yet but I bet Stripe will be able to help figure that out! We handle that for ACH if you're interested.

pbreit 13y ago
Bitcoin does have the capability of "2 of 3" authorizations which can mitigate some of the upfront risk. The idea being that a payment only completes after 2 parties approve it, the 3rd being an independent 3rd party in this case (who could be configured to auto-approve if a complaint isn't filed in x days).
- danielweber 13y ago
  And what stops the customer from filing a bogus complaint, same as they do now if they use a credit card?
  - pbreit 13y ago
    Getting kicked out of the system.
    - seabee 13y ago
      Only if the incentives of the third party align this way, which is very unlikely as many merchants burned by PayPal/eBay can attest to.
      - pbreit 13y ago
        We used to kick chronic chargebackers out of PayPal and I would assume that still the case to some extent.

wyager 13y ago

> the most important thing, chargebacks. Chargebacks are awful. 99% of the time, the merchant is a trusted party with a reputation to uphold, and the customer is a nobody who either couldn't care less about or couldn't be held to their reputation. Established companies won't go around overtly scamming people. The only time that chargebacks are really a good thing is with the very uncommon untrusted-merchant sale (like a new seller on Ebay with little/no feedback).

zanny 13y ago
And in these situations it makes more sense to just use a trusted third party broker than to have it built into the transaction schema. It adds huge amounts of overhead and unpredictability to what should be simple exchange.
gnopgnip 13y ago
If chargebacks were not available they would happen much more often. This is evident by looking at the bitcoin community as a whole.
Nursie 13y ago
Even nobodies have the right to be dealt with fairly and receive their money back if the company dealing with them has fouled up. We've seen again and again in the bitcoin world that companies with truct built up can either take the money and run, or just fail miserably. Consumer protections are a god thing. Chargebacks themselves are a necessary part of the trust infrastructure you talk about. Not just for new merchants, they keep the established ones honest too.

runeks 13y ago

> Bitcoin will have to provide the same level of consumer comfort and safety to have wider adoption. I think I know what you mean by that statement, but I want to make claer that Bitcoin (the protocol) should never provide this. This is like wanting to build guarantee-of-delivery into the IP protocol. It's completely unnecessary and counter-productive. We want to preserve the ability to send funds to people where chargebacks aren't required, just as we want to be able to send data to people where guarantee-of-delivery isn't required. Stripe, BitPay, Coinbase, PayPal etc. should be the ones who choose to provide chargeback services.