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You've made some assumptions here about the impact of a verified supply chain for vape cartridges, and it sounds like you're proposing a solution to a non-existent problem.

A reputable supplier of vape cartridges gains nothing from having a verified supply chain - people trust them anyway and they maintain a supply of good cartridges to protect that reputation.

A non-reputable supplier of vape cartridges doesn't care, and only sells to people who don't care what they're buying. Their lack of good reputation doesn't matter, and their lack of a verifiable supply chain won't matter either.

If the customer wants a dodgy black market vape cartridge, that's what they'll buy. If they want a quality one from a reputable source, they can already do this.

That's a fair point. But I mentioned high schoolers in my example because they can't buy from a reputable source since they're not old enough (not that I think they should be vaping at all, but supply and demand...).

But still, the perpetrators here are not technically capable of pulling off a convincing forgery, so if the kids were sensitive to this issue in the first place then I guess there would indeed be no reason to insert a blockchain into the situation.

So let's take a scenario where the middle men are indeed capable of convincing forgeries: sneakers. Cardano is working on a supply chain integration there too:

https://beincrypto.com/new-balance-to-use-cardano-technology...

And my wife's students (she's a teacher) are really into their sneakers. They're also largely unaware that chain/web of trust type measures exist at all for validation of product authenticity--but if Nike started doing this, they'd become experts overnight. And then, after school, when offered a sketchy vape product, they might think twice.

Maybe that's a weak argument too. Still, I like the ability to use the same channels you money would flow through to determine if your upcoming purchase came from where you think it did, and I think that that's a capability that's going to be hard for fiat currency to mimic.

>I bet A and C are going to be in the hundreds of millions, if not billions, while B is going to be in the tens of millions and D is going to be in the thousands of dollars.

Bitcoin is incredibly wasteful. If we're talking about digital transactions we already have credit cards and digital transfers. A block chain isn't required for those benefits.

Supply chain tracking is interesting but literally no one is talking about that. Its also an even harder problem. Its really not verifiable at all because you're now relying on data from outside the chain, ie how many widgets were created, whether the label on the real life widget is unique or forged, etc.

I expect the waste of Bitcoin will not carry forward into its successors. Nobody has yet proven that high value proof of stake currencies can scale, but I bet they will.

Also, what kind of consumer protections would you want to see in a currency? It seems to me that ensuring that you actually got what you paid for pretty much sums it up but I'm probably overlooking something.

> they could provide consumers (and authorities) a way to trace their products back to their origins, a capability that already would have saved several lives.

Why would blockchain be required for that? In case of drugs and food there recalls are being done using batch number of day of production.

Suppose somebody named Mary wants to sell you a vape cartridge which has a serial number, and they also give your a website which accepts the serial number and tells you:

> Joe runs the factory and gave this cartridge to Bob. Bob have it to Mary.

The assumption is that if you buy it then the site will then say:

> And Mary gave it to aiCeivi9

What reason do you have to believe that the website contents are accurate or that people accepting vape cartridges from Joe Bob and Mary are still alive?

In the blockchain case, you can see that Joe Bob and Mary have sold thousands of these and that very few of the transactions are in dispute over authenticity. Also, rather than trusting some faceless 4.6 star rating you can see which of the people that supplied the rating are ones that you know, and which of those are ones that you trust. You can also see if you trust people who trust Joe Bob and Mary. This let's you make a more informed decision about the quality of the thing you're buying.

Yea, having third parties capable of reversing transactions has an associated cost. But, it’s Billions relative to fraud, so Billions ends up being cheap.

Yeah, for now it's all we have, so I guess the juice is worth the squeeze. But in a world where our cryptocurrencies are a bit more mature I think we can stop being reactive by reversing transactions and start being preventative by using their structure to build chains and webs of trust that make fraud harder to commit up front, rather than just making it harder to get away with.

The amounts to giving the advantage to fraudsters until something that doesn't exist is invented.

Blockchains are irrevocable and unalterable, which removes two useful tools (reversing and changing transactions), and replaces them with nothing workable.

> Blockchains are irrevocable and unalterable

But so are events in the real world. When you think about "reversing or changing a transaction" what you really mean is creating a new transaction that brings an equivalent amount back to the person that paid it.

This is done in the real world by knowing the identity of the receiver person or entity and threatening them with consequences if the money is not returned. It seems to me more a problem of being able to identify the parties in a transaction rather than of mutability of the ledger.

The faults that people are attributing to blockchain are also applicable to cash, if you go the market and buy some magic beans from dodgy Dave with cash you won't be getting your money back. If you buy something from a reputable supplier with cash/blockchain then you would probably get a refund if you had some form of receipt.

Sure, cash has some of the same shortcomings of BTC, but that's why cash isn't touted as the future of payments and in modern economies is mostly used for transactions which are either small or illegal, and isn't considered to be a smart way of storing or carrying large amounts of money.

The initial question was whether cryptocurrencies have the capacity for consumer protection measures, not whether those measures are ready for prime time. I'm just arguing that when they're ready, they'll be more efficient than what we have, so we should encourage their development in the meantime (though maybe not in Libra's particular case).

Also, there are limits on how old a transaction can be when a bank goes and rewrites history. In my experience the limit is about six months. Transactions older than than are considered settled.

If this is a feature that people want in a cryptocurrency, it shouldn't be hard to achieve with smart contracts. The problem right now is just that you need a solid settlement layer before you work on features supporting the politics of rejiggering unsettled transactions.

Also, provided there is community consensus (this differs based on whether your currency is proof of work or proof is stake) blockchains can be altered after-the-fact to undo a threat. It happens: https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/telecom/internet/ethereu...

It's just that for most currencies, it's currently a political affair that occurs at a risk to the stability of the overall system. But there are (what appear to be) good technical solutions to that (decred, for example, has a neat approach to post-fork-attempt stability https://medium.com/decred/detailed-analysis-of-decred-fork-r...).

As far as deciding whether a transaction ought to be settled in the first place, people are experimenting with some really interesting approaches (https://particl.wiki/learn/market/mad-escrow for instance).

It's probably not time to forget your bank password and switch to crypto, but if we want to eventually have good solutions to our fraud problems then we should be working to shape crypto into the system we want, not dismissing it as inflexible.

Out of that entire list, the one thing that exists now is the Ethereum blockchain fix, and that basically required global agreement to respond to a single theft. That's not particularly scalable.

The rest of the things on the list aren't in significant use at the moment, and might never be. Measures that are not ready for prime-time are as good as nonexistent. We're talking about money here!

> Measures that are not ready for prime-time are as good as nonexistent

That's not how technology works. To become fruitful it requires patience and investment. Nobody is saying you have to be an early adopter of these currencies.

> We're talking about money here!

...and particularly whether it's current feature set is amenable to fraud prevention. I work at a traditional payments company and the waste is infuriating--there has to be a better way.

> Nobody is saying you have to be an early adopter of these currencies.

This here is probably the source of our disagreement. As far as I can tell, tons of people actually are saying "get in now", which means we're no longer in the patience and investment stage, and any deficiencies in the cryptocurrency ecosystem have real consequences.

Yeah, I think you're right. There are all of these people who bought in because they just wanted to make money, and they're getting impatient and trying to get the rest of the world in too.

I'm interested in the tech and I want to work on it--so I'm just arguing that we shouldn't dismiss it.

If you have the interest, now might be a good time to diversify in that direction, but it's nowhere near ready to compete with fiat currency in terms of usage by the masses.

There are generally 3 kinds of fraud

1. A scammer cheating someone out of their life savings through social engineering

2. A central bank "unjustly" inflating currency and giving the newly printed money to specific industry/people etc

3. A person paying for merchandise with a stolen credit card or refusing payment after services/good is delivered.

Fiat solves 1 and 3 (recovery) does not think 2 is a problem.

Crypto solves 2 and 3. People say it is meant for solving 1.

The logical followup question would be which problem is actually the most serious?

It's difficult to argue that low and predictable rates of USD inflation has had more of an adverse impact on holders of USD over the last few years than crypto fraud on holders of crypto.

Indeed, given that most cryptoassets have actually lost significant amounts of value against the USD since the end of 2017, it's difficult even to argue that the crypto world has adequately solved 2

Your wallet can be stolen and when using crypto so it doesn't solve 3 very well.

Credit card fraud is regulated such that the consumer is protected after a manageable amount of theft, $50 in the US last I looked. If you use a bank you receive some protections but at that point the implantation is abstracted and not that relevant.

IMO Cryrto is significantly worse in case 3.

If you use a smart contract wallet you can actually protect yourself from losing all your money even if someone gets your private key.

You can set a withdrawal limit of say, $50 and you can set a few recovery addresses (of friends, family or other personal wallets).

So if I have $10,000 in my ethereum wallet and I post my private key in every forum and every chatroom on the internet then the most I lose is $50. Before 24 hours pass I send my remaining $9,950 to a pre-defined recovery address which is excluded from the withdrawal limit.

Consumer protections are actually pretty good. The trouble is getting these tools in the hands of users.

The cost of doing that is making the wallet largely useless for purchasing anything over 50$. The independent ability to send all your money to a recovery address is a new security risk. Further, you need to notice the issue which means you could be our far more than 50$ unless you happen to be checking how much is in the wallet constantly.

So, this is strictly worse than using a credit card.

>The cost of doing that is making the wallet largely useless for purchasing anything over 50$.

I don't think I ever spend that much in a single day though. The limit will differ from person to person.

>The independent ability to send all your money to a recovery address is a new security risk.

It's not new and it's not a risk. You could always send all your money to another address. And the recovery addresses are meant to be trusted. I could send my money to a secondary wallet sitting in a safe or to a trusted family member. That isn't a risk.

>Further, you need to notice the issue which means you could be our far more than 50$ unless you happen to be checking how much is in the wallet constantly.

Your balance is printed in big letters whenever you open the wallet. It's hard to not notice really. There's also these things called automatic notifications, not difficult to set up.

>So, this is strictly worse than using a credit card.

But this is supposed to replace cash not credit cards. It is objectively better than cash in terms of consumer protections.

It’s the “independent ability” that’s new. Without that you just need to keep your key safe. With it your key could be safe and you still end up with a problem.

> objectively better than cash

Many people don’t use cash just credit cards. They might keep 50$ or less in their wallets, but that’s about it.

Further, Billions of people can hack my PC, only those I come into contact with can take my cash.

You still need the private key to make a transfer. This is for cases when you key is stolen.

>Many people don’t use cash just credit cards. They might keep 50$ or less in their wallets, but that’s about it.

Because they value convenience over privacy and freedom.

>Further, Billions of people can hack my PC, only those I come into contact with can take my cash.

Even if someone managed to gain access to your wallet they would still have to decrypt your private key. So, it isn't an issue if you use a strong password.

Who says it is meant for solving case 1? I have literally never heard that as a selling point, and I hung around the crypto crowd for quite a while.

Maybe in the tech community but there was a lot of misunderstanding around concepts like "everything is secure and traceable" and what that implied.