Comment by RIMR | Hacker News Reader

Comment by RIMR | Hacker News Reader

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Again, this assumes that everyone buying cryptocurrencies are financially irresponsible people.

I have been doing this for years. While I have been lucky to consistently pull a profit, I never invested more than I could afford - and I certainly never planned to see a single cent I invested return to me (as one should assume with any investment).

If you are buying any cryptocurrency with the expectation of reselling at a profit, and you are falling into more debt than you can afford to be in while doing so, the issue was never cryptocurrency, but rather your willingness to borrow more money than you can afford to pay back.

Given that profits were never a guarantee, anyone expecting guaranteed profit already exhibits the kind of high-risk financial decision-making that deserves a low credit score as a consequence for unpaid debts, regardless of what they spend the borrowed money on.

It's not even about financial responsibility; I'm in no way advocating for chargeback fraud, but people overwhelmingly win disputes and the way these payments are processed promote ease-of-use and ease-of-disputes.

Crypto companies could default to push payments and/or micro-deposits for verifying ownership of a fiat instrument, but people want their coinz now and that causes friction that shrinks user activation funnels.

Merchants have to keep their CB ratios under 1%, or else Visa/MC/the bank processing their fiat will fire them. Bank fraud analysts probably have their own bank-side incentives to give customers the benefit of the doubt, and it's too easy for someone to maliciously load up on 2+ months of purchases, walk to their bank, state "I've never heard of Bitcoin someone hacked me and bought $6k in crypto I need that back", and win.

This assumes, based on the actual evidence, that the set of people who buy cryptocurrencies on credit are more likely to default on them than a set of people with the same credit ratings buying sofas (and that raising APRs to cover these increased losses will have other adverse affects on a credit card company's business).

If people are speculating beyond their means in crypto because they think the line of easy credit gives them a means to make a profit out of it, it's far easier for everyone involved to just cut the line of easy credit for the crypto, because the same person is probably not going to try to make a profit loading up their card with consumer goods or cars or other things the credit card company doesn't mind extending credit for instead.

I really don't understand why you believe it is reasonable or preferable to oblige credit card companies to take losses instead.

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