>> shifts risk from sellers to buyers (e.g. compare refund possibilities with credit cards). Dollar couples financial services with money transmission. Bitcoin

>> shifts risk from sellers to buyers (e.g. compare refund possibilities with credit cards). Dollar couples financial services with money transmission. Bitcoin allows to decouple those. Refunds can be covered by escrow services (with small help of 3-of-2 multisig) which can be provided by multiple parties, not only by your CC/bank. Please provide a single example of service that can be provided by CCs but can not be provided by companies that operate on Bitcoin network. >> There are various hacks that are being proposed to increase the number of transactions per second, and reduce confirmation time. Confirmation time is irrelevant, what you really care about in POS situation is TX delivery time - and it's covered by BIP70. BitPay serves BIP70 since Feb 2014. TPS scales to Visa levels and beyond and there is nothing "hacky" about that. Increased block size are countered by IBLTs. Want to talk about hacks of all kind? Talk about today's banks tech. Hundreds of millions of dollars being stolen by hackers, hundreds of billions of dollars of drug money being laundered by HSBC and friends, tech out of sixties, broken security model of CC, huge amount of regulation that attempts to fix all this mess. Costs costs costs. This is unfixable mess. Disclosure - I own small(!) amount of Bitcoin.