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Comment by jhart3333 | Hacker News Reader

>> There is still no incentive to get paid in BTC

How about no chargebacks? That seems to be a pretty big issue for anyone doing business on the internet.

Chargebacks, while inconvenient for vendors, provide utility to consumers, especially online when there can be a long delay between paying and getting to receive/examine the product.

Chargebacks do provide utility to consumers, but they also provide utility to scammers and fraudsters, who use chargebacks to steal more than $10 billion a year in the US alone. The cost of this, and fraud prevention and dispute resolution, is ultimately passed back to the consumer as higher prices.

From the most negative point of view, the chargeback mechanism could be seen as a sleight of hand marketing trick that was necessary to get consumers to accept new payment methods, by hiding the real costs.

When people mention "no charge-backs" as an incentive to merchants to use bitcoin, they seem to not realize or gloss over the fact that for that benefit to be realized would require the merchant only transacting in bitcoin. It's not like they can say, charge-back scammers have to use bitcoin, everyone else, credit/debit is fine.

I can't imagine that there are many business where the cost/benefit of only accepting bitcoin to eliminate chargeback losses makes sense.

It doesn't have to be so black and white as that. You can take into account other factors such as country of origin of the consumer and identifying information provided as whether to accept a credit card payment or not.

No chargebacks is an excellent reason for a consumer not to use Bitcoin.

I have never ever had to request a chargeback from my credit card company. I have, however, returned many items which were voluntarily refunded by the merchant, even those items paid with cash or cash equivalent. But then again, I also don't buy from sketchy vendors that have no incentive to want to gain/maintain your trust.

I made a purchase from a site operated by an artist I had been a fan of for 8 years. The order was never fulfilled despite my PayPal account being charged. No one from the site ever returned my messages. I reversed it without issue. If it had been bitcoin, I'd simply have lost the money.

Consumers like knowing they have an element of protection when buying something from a store they can not visit from people they'll never meet. As someone that has worked with ecommerce websites for the past 15 years and currently has $110 worth of bitcoin in my wallet, I don't think that is likely to change anytime soon. Especially not with the current pitch of bitcoin.

Collectively we (as a generation, let alone a culture) haven't reached a point where more shopping is done online then in person. Until we start to approach that point we don't start to a bigger push for online digital currencies form the general population.

And even then "online digital currencies" aren't really particularly needed where there are satisfactory online digital payment mechanisms denominated in traditional currencies.

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