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Comment by rr808 | Hacker News Reader

I wonder in the crypto based future if there will be any safeguards to avoid scams and fraud. Instant settlement is not a good thing for me, Ideally any transaction over $1000 should take a week and can be cancelled. Transactions over $100k I'd like to go to a physical location and prove my identity.

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In many cryptocurrencies, you can cancel a transaction before the first confirmation by paying a (relatively) small fee. Your other points defeat the purpose of most crypto, though.

The original Bitcoin paper says:

> Transactions that are computationally impractical to reverse would protect sellers from fraud, and routine escrow mechanisms could easily be implemented to protect buyers.

Emphasis added.

It is conceptually possible to create a crypto "credit card". But given that existing transactions are already slow, expensive, and complicated to integrate - I can't see it being attractive.

There's also the issue of trust. Escrow merchants need to be highly-trusted by both sides. They also need regulation and insurance. Those things are all in short-supply in cryptoland.

Escrow doesn't magically solve the problem, a way to mediate disputes would be required. That probably will fail in very similar ways to the way the systems we have today fail.

Exactly, this is all entirely possible technically while remaining decentralised, the issue is fundamentally this is really a human problem not a technical one

Bitcoin may be better compared to gold bars: I give someone a couple gold bars and then realize it was a mistake. Those gold bars are gone unless the other party is willing to return them.

Credit cards have a 3% charge on everything. That is a LOT of money but we allow it partially because of the insurance attached to it.

We pay for title companies for property exchanging partially because of the insurance.

We pay for insurance for the insurance.

With layer 2, probably centralized, payment networks. Layer 1 is too "low level" for most transactions.

Vaults are a proposed Bitcoin construct that allow you to have similar features. In order to work, it requires some breaking changes which may or may not ever happen.

With crypto, if you are not using a cold wallet when having a big balance, then the problem exclusively is you.

These are exactly the types of things Chia is working on, and at least to some degree, are in production.

Of course, if the sender can cancel transactions at their discretion, that enables another class of frauds. The solution has to lie in some trusted centralized party outside the payment system [0]. Chia can't solve this. A banking system and legal system can.

[0] Goharshady, A. K. (2021). Irrationality, Extortion, or Trusted Third-parties: Why it is Impossible to Buy and Sell Physical Goods Securely on the Blockchain (arXiv:2110.09857). http://arxiv.org/abs/2110.09857

It’s amazing watching the crypto folks slowly reinvent the entire banking industry.

Also kinda pointless though.

Eventually you can only solve this by arresting the criminals

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