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Comment by mrb | Hacker News Reader

I feel sorry for you. Truly. I have to say—and maybe you have heard it—but cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin precisely avoid this sort of horror story. When you receive a Bitcoin payment, no one can take the money from you (no chargeback fraud, no payment processor to freeze your account), thanks to the decentralized nature of the system because bitcoins are received directly into your local wallet.

Seek legal help to fight your case. And in parallel, look into accepting and promoting Bitcoin payments for your business.

Heck, Bitcoin is even becoming more and more popular among B2B business suppliers (according to BitPay CEO https://medium.com/@spair/the-bitcoin-fee-market-4df1857d12b...). So if you start receiving BTC payments from customers you may use them directly to pay your suppliers without even converting to USD.

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Yeah, no. Bitcoin eliminates chargeback fraud by completely eliminating the whole idea of chargebacks. You can tell your customers that if they don't get what they paid for and you don't feel like helping them, then they're basically screwed. Let's see how many people buy your product once they realize that. Talk about the cure being worse than the disease.

This in addition to it being virtually impossible for ordinary users to even get bitcoins. People here are talking about losing double-digit percentages of their purchases from Paypal forcing users to create a Paypal account, which takes like 30 seconds. What percent of your customers do you think you'll still have after you force them to do a wire transfer to a moderately sketchy exchange website, wait 2-3 days, set up a Bitcoin wallet somewhere, figure out how to do Bitcoin transfers, etc?

You are right there is friction for customers to acquire bitcoins. My post was meant to expose the advantages for merchants, for whom there exists practically zero downsides (as opposed to customers.) But again I am not suggesting "forcing" customers to pay with Bitcoin. I am suggesting to add it as an extra payment option.

That said, it is becoming easier than you think to purchase BTC. There is no need to wire money anymore. In the US bitcoins can be purchased instantly with a credit card via Coinbase, as easy as signing up for Paypal.

> There is no need to wire money anymore. In the US bitcoins can be purchased instantly with a credit card via Coinbase, as easy as signing up for Paypal.

The caveats being a 3.75% surcharge and the fact that many of the big banks will not authorize bank card transactions from Coinbase. You might have luck calling up your bank and getting them to release the hold on Coinbase transactions, but that's already more trouble and more expense than paypal.

I literally laughed out loud at this. Bitcoin does not solve for any of this. Maybe it will stop some large corporation from putting a hold on your "cash" but bitcoin is by no means safe from theft. You can be your own payment processor, but you will still have angry customers. In fact you will probably have far less customers because most normal consumers want to protections that using a service like PayPal provides.

(Sorry I was in a hurry and miswrote! English is not my native language. I edited my post to clarify.)

What I meant to say is that Bitcoin eliminates chargeback fraud, because payments are irreversible. That plus Bitcoin eliminating the need for a payment processor who may freeze your money are 2 real problems that Bitcoin solves.

Theft is also solved by storing bitcoins in a hardware wallet (or 2 for a backup) like Trezor, Ledger, etc. To date no credible theft of coins stored in a hw wallet has ever been reported.

And I don't recommend to only accept Bitcoin payments. As you point out this would severely limit sales. At least sabslaurent could accept it as an additional payment option, which would provide an extra revenue stream not subject to Paypal's risks.

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