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Comment by ZetaZero | Hacker News Reader

How will Bitcoin fix it? If I buy a video card with bitcoin, but get sent a brick instead, how does "Blockchain as Arbiter" get my bitcoins back?

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>How will Bitcoin fix it?

The problem is theft of your funds without your consent over your unpopular political speech. Bitcoin cannot be taken from you by any third party, provided you self-custody and adequately protect your keys.

>If I buy a video card with bitcoin, but get sent a brick instead, how does "Blockchain as Arbiter" get my bitcoins back?

Unrelated to the problem being discussed, but still a problem. Unfortunately, this is not a problem unique to Bitcoin, nor a problem adequately solved by PayPal, as explained in other comments, so it's hardly a robust criticism against BTC.

Full dislcosure: I own BTC, but less than 0.5% of my net worth, I do not own it for speculative reasons, and I do not view it as an investment or store of value, only as an alternative payment network.

Is it theft if you've agreed to a contract stating those as penalties?

Legally, no, which is why I don't use PayPal and never will again, but to the layperson, who almost invariably does not read those contracts, and might be incapable of understanding the contract even if they chose to read it, I suspect it would look, sound, and feel a lot like theft.

But again, that's the beauty of Bitcoin. There is no dense legalese with sneaky technicalities that allow other parties to seize your funds over the contents of your speech, so long as you self-custody and adequately protect your keys. I understand that's also not something all laypeople can be expected to do, but I prefer to have the option than to not have the option.

Isn't that the beauty of PayPal too? As long as I follow certain tricky practices including self censorship, my money is safe.

Swapping out dense legalese with sneaky technicalities for dense technical requirements with sneaky technicalities isn't particularly different.

Even then, you still aren't protected from signing bad contracts, either smart or regular

Smart contracts for bitcoin? Can you provide some documentation on that?

> The problem is theft of your funds without your consent over your unpopular political speech.

As much as I want to roll my eyes at this, it's important no matter what your political opinion is! For now we might be talking "unpopular" but what if you have political speech that is popular but opposes what the people in charge at the time think?

BTC doesn't help with transactions, you still end up trusting a 3rd-party (or the party you're transacting with, in which case a bank transfer would also work fine). There will be no censorship to send your BTC, but you can't give guarantees about what will happen for the other part of the transaction without this trust.

The use-case you mentioned is just that of a bank account. The right to have such a bank account should be enforced by regulation where it's not the case yet, as storing your wealth in an asset with such high volatility is not an actual solution.

Paypal refused me a refund after someone didn't even send me a brick, but just sent me someone else's FedEx shipment confirmation. Didn't even say my address and was delivered before I ordered. I was instantly denied because their shitty AI dispute process just checks the FedEx zipcode. Paypal wouldn't even let me talk to a real person. Fuck that company.

Use a credit card instead. Luckily, I payed paypal through a credit card. So I disputed it through the bank instead.

Bitcoin fixes it by reducing the number of scammers in the chain. if you deal with a seller and paypal, either the paypal or the seller can scam you. paypal is immune to bad press because their reputation is already rock bottom, so they don't even lose any reputation anymore by rampantly thieving and scamming. At least if, with a cryptocurrency, the seller scams you, you can voice it somewhere their reputation will be at risk. It doesn't delete the risk but the fixes the problem of "middle man is a scammer and thief and nobody is willing to do anything at all about it" that exists with paypal.

Who do I complain to to get the BTC back from Celsius?

Who do I complain to get my money from holding USD?

If you have a bank account with $1000 last year, you have $1000 today.

If you had a Celsius account with 10 BTC last year, you have 0 BTC today.

Pretty different situation.

There's nobody you can complain to to get your money back from paypal in many situations, especially when it comes to receiving payments. If you use a credit card or have a bank send them money you have better options, but many people scammed by paypal have no recourse when they are on the receiving end of the money (which is the primary reason you'd have money held in paypal to begin with, as typically if you're sending it along you're not letting it sit there in the account).

lets you decide who to trust to have the power to approve chargebacks instead of defacto trusting the fed

"The fed" doesn't approve chargebacks.

at a deeper level it does

Quick, someone build a $hitcoin escrow service to fix the GPU-brick problem.

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