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Comment by dvide | Hacker News Reader

But you still end up paying for the possibility of those disputes in terms of higher prices. If you make a dispute because somebody stole your card and bought stuff, the damage isn't simply undone by a chargeback. The merchant loses out. Chargebacks from identity theft, as you describe, are a massive source of risk to merchants, and they have to factor that into the price of their items. What's more, the credit card companies impose large fees on merchants who get too many disputes against them (even if they aren't engaging in fraud themselves, but instead they are the ones getting defrauded through the process you described).

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What your describing are reasons for merchants to adopt Bitcoins not consumers. Because, merchants charge people paying with cash the same price as those paying with credit cards and distribute the costs between them. So, as a system you might have a point, but as with a classic prisoner's dilemma there is zero advantage to me for giving up that protection. And, if I have a rewards credit card I can extract money from those who pay with cash or theoretically Bitcoins.

PS: I still think Bitcoins are an interesting idea. I am just describing why their adoption has been so slow. There is simply no compelling reason for significant legal transactions to use Bitcoins, which covers for their inherent risks.

One reason for consumers is built-in deflation. Money has to be scarce; 21million is a ridiculously low number, and bitcoins are very scarce.

This comes up pretty often, but it's worth noting that it's built-in scarcity. Deflation in the sense of increasing purchasing power will only happen if it is more widely adopted as a medium of exchange (which is definitely possible.) It its use as a medium of exchange diminishes, it could actually see inflation in the sense of decreasing purchasing power.

Unlike cash and gold, Bitcoin can be divided down to 8 decimals. So it doesn't really matter how many millions of bitcoins there are. The important thing is that bitcoin can't be printed by central banks.

For most people this is a negative.

"most people"

This is a baseless statement.

I, for one, don't want my bank controlling my money supply or telling me how I can and can't spend it.

Children don't like their parents forcing them to eat vegetables but that doesn't mean it isn't good for them. You may not like the bank controlling the money supply but that doesn't mean you haven't benefited from it.

And my claim is hardly "baseless". You can reject the orthodox views but please don't claim to be in the majority -- whether we use the polite term "heterodox" or the less polite "crank" the fringe nature of such views is apparent.

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