Which is why consumers enthusiastically abandoned them for credit the moment they could. Purposefully going backwards is both silly, and something you’ll never convince the average consumer to do.
I don't use dispute resolution unless someone actually stole my credit card number like when my card info was jacked at a gas pump one time. Credit cards are quite insecure and we still have to type in all our personal info online every single transaction which is dangerous and dumb and makes the whole system vulnerable to credit card fraud in a way that crypto isn't. When you use crypto you simply sign a transaction message, you don't have to give away your private keys to make the transaction occur.
That's just what humans do to each other. New tech is always like this when there are gains to be made.
Some folks look at the trend that central banks have been on and the creep of financial surveillance and think purposefully going backward in some areas isn't silly at all.
In the end, it's software you don't have to use. Nobody is forcing anyone to opt in, right (you know, like the credit bureaus who in America force you to opt in if you intend to... I dunno, participate in the economy in a meaningful way)?
Second, adoption is way up and btc is only one cryptocurrency. It gets first-mover advantage in this market (unfairly, probably) and so continues to be a bellwether despite the fact that it is a relative dinosaur, technology wise. I'm fine with that, personally, despite the problems with the technology.
That you haven't adopted the tech doesn't mean that adoption is failing, you know. There are more users every year (this is difficult to pin down for obvious & good reasons, but the indicators are solid) and no technology with millions of users globally, including institutional adopters, can be said to be failing.
Further, to call any payments technology 'mildly popular' which safeguards USD 1.5-2.5 trillion (total cryptocurrency market cap, BTC accounting for over 760 billion alone, despite the recent corrections) in deflationary wealth undermines your argument to the point of bad faith. Is the cryptocurrency market overheated and full of nonsense? Of course. But let's do the analyses with level heads at least.
Humans have been using credit systems for millennia. The implication that in the olden days people only walked around with bits of gold in their pockets is a bit of “retconning.”
This article includes some interesting tidbits: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/08/05/the-invention-...
Paper currency is a couple millenia older than the printing press, using woodlblock printing.
If we're talking specifically about credit cards, the credit card went from new invention to ubiquity in a couple of decades. But I think that's too narrow a scope to look at, to be honest.
Early credit systems did not depend upon the printing press; think of the widespread use of tally sticks in medieval Europe to enable illiterate low-technology credit systems.
It's really hard to approach this anthropologically, IMO, because so many other variables change. Less complex economies do fine with "local communism" and person-to-person debt, but it's hard to imagine using such a thing to order from Amazon. Conversely, coinage historically was useful if you had to exchange with someone with whom you didn't have a personal relationship (say, you're traveling to a faraway land and you can't just provide an IOU), but that's somewhat obsolete now.
I guess my conclusion would be that these historical analogies don't shed a lot of light.
https://www.amazon.com/History-Money-Jack-Weatherford/dp/060...
In Europe credit cards are not very common, and debit card transactions are often not reversible.
A generalisation like this is no better than the frequent occurrence of HNers posting articles headlined with "the nation" which mean "the USA".
Anyone who has worked with payment processing can tell you how rare debit card chargebacks are, this is because they’re usually vastly more difficult.