One major benefit is that the transactions are non-reversible. I suppose if you're a crooked merchant, that's not good for people.
But credit card companies have made it so easy for users to press one button to chargeback that some less than ethical consumers do this on a regular basis and get away with it.
Another thing to keep in mind is that if you operate a business and accept bitcoin as one form of payment, nobody can cut off your means to accept payment. If the kind of product or service you provide is something banks don't want to touch (even though they are legal), then you're left with few options unless you consider cryptocurrency payments. Even if you get a credit card merchant agreement, the ccard companies will routinely shut you down until you have a conversation with them, reminding them that their senior risk department has already verified you multiple times. Trust me, that gets old.
Do you have a link/source to reversed BTC transactions?
At point 3, you seem to be strawmanning ETH for BTC, where it seems the user you're replying to is referring to BTC.
Early tech is early tech. We all know this. More people use the internet now that you don't have to dial-up and make your phone line busy for it.
Credit card fees are (typically) pushed to merchants, the actually settlement time takes far longer than the transaction time.
Let's say in 10 years, all of your issues are solved by a cryptocurrency -- would you like the option of having a non-state issued, hard to confiscate, tamper-resistant money?
> Do you have a link/source to reversed BTC transactions?
"Ethereum Executes Blockchain Hard Fork to Return DAO Funds". If you tell me I'm strawmanning ETH for BTC (or whatever other bullshit three-letter acronym) I answer this: it does not matter. Something that happens in one, will happen in another. The precedent has been set, the path is clear.
> At point 3, you seem to be strawmanning ETH for BTC, where it seems the user you're replying to is referring to BTC.
Doesn't matter. Bitcoin is just as susceptible. And no, Lightning will not save it (for obvious reasons which are totally glossed over by the dreamy-eyed proponents).
> Early tech is early tech. We all know this.
Yes. We know this. Cryptocurrency proponents seem to remember this fact only after being confronted with reality.
See how this conversation played out:
- Day to day transactions are actually the most likely to be disrupted by crypto. The reason for this is crypto can trade with almost zero fees
- No, the fees are not zero. In fact, they are prohibitively high, and unpredictable
- Yes, but... but.. the transactions are non-reversible, and there's fraud protection
- There is at least one precedent of a cryptocurrency being hard forked to reverse transactions. Fraud is already being handled. etc. etc.
- Yes, but.. but... it's early tech!
Indeed. It's early tech with very few, if any, practical uses. With exorbitant unpredictable fees, extremely slow transactions, overall inefficiency etc. etc. etc. And yet for some reason it's hailed as the saviour of everyone and everybody now even though it offers a near-zero improvement on what we already have today.
Bitcoin is the best cryptocurrency. I expect that bitcoin will beat the record this year too) Because I want to buy bitcoins. What is the best way to do this? Apparently it's buy bitcoins with paypal ( https://bitcoinbestbuy.com/how-buy-bitcoins-paypal/ ). Or I'm wrong?
A real merchant example: Steam had to stop accepting bitcoins because:
- transactions took too long o complete
- (main reson) fees were unpredictable and sometimes higher than the cost if the game