10 to 30 minutes seems a lot closer to how long it takes for a stock sale to go through on E-Trade so I can see why the IRS would classify it more like a stock than currency.
Have you ever used a card? If you think that opening your phone, scanning a QR and then hitting "verify" is faster than a tap or swipe of your credit card, I'm not sure what to tell you. Best case scenario, they're about the same.
>I can call up my card company and claim a fraudulent charge after getting the goods
And they'll investigate and determine you committed fraud, and you'll be fined or go to prison. What's the equivalent with Bitcoin?
> And they'll investigate
Have you never reported fraudulent charges before? There's basically no investigation unless it was an ACH thing.
Trust me, nothing happens to these people. From first-hand experience I know that the merchant eats the cost 99% of the time when it's a card-not-present transaction.
Yes, because obviously what we need is less power to the consumer.
So what if it takes you 60 minutes to get home just to test the product you just bought? Or that you can't dispute frauds that target seniors (i.e. grandma), because she won't tell you what she bought within 60 minutes but only the next time you call her?
The digital nature + relative untracability + no chargebacks makes Bitcoin scammer heaven.
I don't understand your grandma rhetoric. Not that scammers aren't already in heaven (especially targeting seniors) but I guess I'd be interested if you have any peer reviewed papers studying the means scammers use and how much cryptocurrency is part of the modern scammer's toolkit. (My understand was that wire transfers through western digital were the most common means of extracting payment.)
* You can't 'opt-in' to 'various escrow or risk-absorbing systems'. That's because these services simply do not exist at this moment at Bitcoin-land. They may well never exist or be supported by merchants. You're comparing a non-existing theoretical model against real-world working stuff.
* Unfortunately, elder fraud is too rife where I live. The scammers call the elderly person, convince him/her to buy various utterly useless stuff like a rock to scare away tigers. This is almost never done in person, but by phone, and they use credit card details. At least there, there's some hope of chargebacks and a record of the transaction. Removing even those limited restraints... that's not what we need.
Ultimately it boils down to, without comment on the desirability of making it possible to purchase illegal goods, can your proposals match the low amount of information darknet markets require along with the low amount of friction in making a payment? (A shipping address for physical items is the maximal information needed by any party in that whole system.)
For your second point, you can opt-in. Basic escrow has existed since the beginning with m-of-n signature transactions, various wallets have UIs for it. I'll just leave this here: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Multisignature For "risk-absorbing systems" for merchants, those too have been around. BitPay is probably still the most popular, and it's several years old now. https://bitpay.com/ If you as a merchant use them, you can if you want not even bother dealing with BTC and its inherent risks at all but still accept it as a payment method.
For your third point I agree (elder)¹ fraud is a problem, and that if the scammers extract payment with a CC there's at least a chance of getting some money back... but that's not the only way they extract payment. Even if you made CCs magical anti-fraud devices, there would still be unacceptably high amounts of fraud targeting these types of people, because fraud is a complex problem and the institutions most capable of addressing it systematically would rather live with its predictable costs. As such I don't think adding BTC to the mix would harm things (or help things as a BTC fanatic might try and argue) by a noticeable amount in this area.
Admittedly I'm not too confident on this when applied to fraud more broadly; specifically I'm thinking of the new ransomware threat model people have had to contend with in the last few years. Overwhelmingly those attacks (not just against elders, but industrial infrastructure and so forth!) extract payment with cryptocurrencies, though sometimes they accept gift cards etc. Restricted to the elderly, more traditional computer related schemes like "coerce a phone call to a number for 'technical support' and get victim to grant remote access to their computer, 'discover' malware, have victim pay for 'fixing' it via CC/gift card/bank wire..." are still probably going to be the most common. And of course as I wrote above, by having a payment mechanism that shifts the tradeoff in fraud disputes back to the seller, we might see an increase in seller fraud, but how will that compare to the decrease in buyer fraud?
¹A not so elder relative got tricked out of $120 not too long ago, which for him is a significant chunk of change. Fraud is a multi-spectrum problem and in many respects only seems to be getting worse over time.
Giving less of my info to sellers is therefore less a technological characteristic of a payment system, and more a choice by the system's creators. There's no technological hurdle to even having a credit card which gives a bit less info. Theoretically, the credit company only needs to see my expense, current available funds and some transaction/merchant identifier, not exactly what I spend it on or even who I am.
I'm hoping some of the new NFC-based payment systems will make privacy a differentiator. They'll need something if they want to get into the market with such established players. We'll see what Apple comes along with. I've been slagging them quite a bit, but they do try to make privacy a selling point. Perhaps here too?
As for the second issue, I am sure that a form of chargeback could be implemented on top of crypto. Your first link just shows one way to do it - but doesn't link to any implementations of this. The second link explicitly mentions 'no chargebacks', so again, it's theoretical in the sense of not existing.
The hurdle here is again not technological, but the apparently inability of the crypto community to think that people might want this behaviour. Sometimes even sellers. Where I live, allowing return of unused goods before a certain period of time has passed is mandated by law. Payment methods which does not have chargeback may actually complicate seller's business in this case, since than they have to be even more careful against internal fraud and pay an extra fee for the return as if it were a new transfer (if not in cash).
Thirdly, fraud and ransomware are getting worse and worse. I'm sure eventually there'll a crackdown. I just can't predict how, where and when. But crypto would be a very convenient target politically; this doesn't yet require targeting any large stakeholder.
Alas, the one thing the crypto community is right about, is that many economists are just waiting to be able to implement negative interest rates - but I doubt crypto would be able to change anything there.
Of course I have to mention that Bitcoin has unreliable and sometimes very high fees. This is a problem with Bitcoin specifically not with cryptocurrencies in general.
As a practical example I bought computer parts recently and I paid with Bitcoin Cash. When I was prompted to pay I scanned a QR code with my phone and I was done. It was even smoother than having to input my credit card numbers into the site. Of course the experience is the same if you pay in person, which I did at a restaurant when I visited Japan. Extremely easy.
It is, but there are additional technologies being built on top of it that get transaction times down to < 1 second (lightning network). It's definitely still rough around the edges, but it's at the point where it's usable for day to day use.
Also keep in mind, there are other cryptos that exist where the transaction fee is basically free and the transaction confirms in under 2 seconds. Nano is one that comes to mind.
Bitcoin is definitely falling into the "e-gold" category if you ask me.
Its not very practical but this is mostly related to the merchant software and not the underlying technology any longer.
A) Merchants do not have to wait for a transaction to "go through", just like many credit card accepting merchants don't actually connect to the network when they swipe your card. They broadcast the transaction to the payment processor later. The same is possible with bitcoin, resulting in instant transactions for the user experience. It is an option with compromises, just like accepting credit cards is an option with compromises.
B) Consumers can broadcast the transaction to the merchant at the point of sale, but merchants do not have to wait for it to be added to the blockchain. This also results in near instantaneous transactions. It is an option, with compromises, just like accepting credit cards is an option with compromises.
C) Consumers can transmit a signed transaction to the merchant, without needing internet connectivity (nfc, qr codes, sound, bluetooth can work). Merchants can be the internet connected ones and check a balance. This would also be an instanteous user experience.
D) Consumers can transmit unsigned transactions to the merchant without needing internet connectivity, this is the same as C) but also allows for paper notes like national currency with denominations, without exposing the private key of the consumer's treasury.
so there is a lot to build.
weird analogy. stock sales take 3 business days to go through, and the proceeds take another 3 business days to be spendable in a different checking account at a different institution. the securities regulator is trying to get stock sales to get down to 2 and 1 business day.
brokers like e-trade hide most of this behind the scenes, and you can certainly "sell a stock" in a few seconds on etrade. So not sure why it takes you 10-30 minutes?