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So you think bitcoin is harder than: 1. Learning how to open a bank account (requires tons of personal information) 2. Learning how and why to use a debit/cre

• ForHackernews 12y ago
  The point is that 95% of adults have already done #1 and #2 and half of #3, and they have experience giving their credit card info to other websites. Maybe if you were starting tabula rasa with eleven year old children who'd never had a bank account or used a website before, maybe then bitcoin would be easier (provided they didn't get hacked and have their coins stolen[0]). [0] https://twitter.com/Coinapult/status/577892916309291008 https://twitter.com/Coinapult/status/577892916309291008
  • grubles 12y ago
    Incompetence is payment-system-agnostic: http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2014-03-13/target-missed-alarms-in-epic-hack-of-credit-card-data http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2014-03-13/target-misse...
    • ForHackernews 12y ago
      Liability isn't.
      • grubles 12y ago
        Where is this magical land where a company can't be held liable for losses because they accept bitcoin?
• pjc50 12y ago
  The hard part of bitcoin is keeping all the devices you use it on perfectly uncompromised and backed up.
  • grubles 12y ago
    The hard part about using a credit card is trusting the merchant to be perfectly secure.
    • vectorpush 12y ago
      The difference is that stolen bitcoin equates to a permanent loss of funds while a stolen credit card number equates to a customer service phone call.
      • grubles 12y ago
        >13.1 million identity-theft cases were reported in 2013, resulting $18 billion in losses. from https://www.javelinstrategy.com/uploads/web_brochure/1405.R_2014IdentityFraudReportBrochure.pdf https://www.javelinstrategy.com/uploads/web_brochure/1405.R_...
        • thedufer 12y ago
          Banks are the ones taking those losses, and it comes out of the CC fees paid by merchants. Yes, this probably results in price increases, which is like buying insurance - I will pay 2% more for pretty much every good I buy, and in return I will never be defrauded out of my entire life's savings at once. Seems like a good deal to me?
          • grubles 12y ago
            You don't see the problem here do you? 13.1 million people were defrauded because they used a credit card. $18 Billion were lost as a result. Losses due to bitcoin are peanuts in comparison.
            • thedufer 12y ago
              Excellent. Yes, let's go there. Over the course of a year, $18 billion were lost to CC fraud. Meanwhile, CC transactions totaled about $6 trillion [0] (that was 2010, the most recent I could come up with, but it's been increasing every year for a long time so I'll be generous and use it). That's .3% - clearly affordable on the 2-3% merchants typically pay. Meanwhile, Mt. Gox defrauded users out of about 650,000 bitcoins [1]. This was a single instance of fraud, remember - I'm trying to be generous. Eyeballing this chart [2], I'm going to give bitcoin a clearly-exaggerated 200,000 BTC in daily transactions, or 73 million BTC in a year. This comes out to .9%, or about 3 times higher than CC fraud. But remember what I said earlier - CC companies essentially insure you against loss by paying out the fraud themselves and then forcing merchants to raise prices a bit to make up for it. In bitcoin, a given person can easily lose thousands, tens of thousands, millions of dollars, all at once. No recompense. So not only is the rate 3 times higher, the outcome is _way_ worse per dollar lost fraudulently. [0] http://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/credit-card-data/credit-card-transaction-volume-statistics/ http://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/credit-card-data/credit-card-... [1] https://coinreport.net/99-of-mt-gox-bitcoin-losses-likely-fraud-suspect-police/ https://coinreport.net/99-of-mt-gox-bitcoin-losses-likely-fr... [2] https://blockchain.info/charts/estimated-transaction-volume https://blockchain.info/charts/estimated-transaction-volume