Hacker News Reader

Comment by syn0byte | Hacker News Reader

What redress do you think you have even if you "trust" someone? That 100 dollar widget you bought in cash didn't work? Well fuck you, see you in court. Now what? Are you going to take the store to court over 100 bucks? Pay with a card and your card company doesn't want to reverse charges? Same problem... I'd bet that per 5000 transactions, debit and credit cards have more fraud that the 'end user' has no remediation for than bitcoin does.

Sometimes, reinventing the wheel is exactly the point when the wheel has been engineered to favor the engineers.

View on HN

If your card company doesn't reverse charges you can take them to small claims court, and also change card company.

You can't point to one case and say that it doesn't work. My experience is that you as a consumer will win a chargeback. It's so reliable that there mere mention of it to a merchant will make them refund you, because their fees go up if their chargeback rate goes up.

Also cryptocurrencies make this infinitely worse, not better.

If you want to make a case for cryptocurrencies you should actually go with the safety for the merchant, not the consumer. The consumer holds the power with credit cards. But then again today the merchant can always choose to only take debit cards, thus fixing the whole problem.

And it's not like you don't have to trust anyone to use cryptocurrencies. The government will still kick down your door if you break the law because that's what people want from society.

Also the losing side pays the chargeback fees in a chargeback case, which is why for small sums, unless the issuing bank is damned sure they'll win the chargeback, they'll just write it off and give the money to the customer.

Of course you can stiff the legal system. But you can only stiff it so far. I Googled "Ethereum steal" and the top three results have figures in the millions, through something as straightforward as a 51% attack. No court system can simultaneously claim to be fair and just and legitimate, and let slide a $1.1M USD theft. And in such situations, other people usually have a bone to pick with said thief too, bolstering resources on your side.

If a cryptocurrency scales and somebody pulls off a Madoff-level theft (>$64B USD), could you guarantee some amount of clawbacks by technology alone? I wouldn't bet on it.

>through something as straightforward as a 51% attack

... which has never been done before on Ethereum (or Bitcoin). Are you talking about Ethereum Classic? It's something entirely different and amateur. Using it as a criticism of Ethereum is like complaining banks are untrustworthy because a kid at school called himself a bank and didn't give the money back you lent him.

A block chain doesn't solve this in any way. By the time you determine your widget doesn't work, the transaction is complete.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com