Smart move, eBay divests before bitcoin really starts eating PayPal's lunch
It's delusional to think people would want to buy stuff from ebay without the protections from Paypal or their credit card provider.
Current consumer protection advice is to walk away from any sale that uses things like Western Union or cash transfer - and this is likely to be extended to include Bitcoin as soon as anyone in the general public hears about Bitcoin.
But the CC system also provides anonymity, since most cards used for fraud are stolen anyway, so the fact they're tied to a real person is irrelevant.
Bitcoin, on the other hand, doesn't suffer from the same problem as CC - that the payment info must be shared with every single merchant - so it's potentially must harder to steal; Target wouldn't have a copy of your bitcoin wallet just because you bought something from them, for example.
Ignorance creates comments like this. Bitcoin transactions are not reversible, you have zero opportunity for fraud as a buyer.
You see, no payment technology is perfect. Credit cards have flaws. Bitcoin has flaws. But Bitcoin is better than credit cards for the average consumer. In the last 10 years:
- I have had to deal with 2 identity theft incidents that caused me major hassles and waste of time. Bitcoin would have prevented this because a Bitcoin transaction authorizes 1 and only 1 payment to a specific address. Bitcoin utilizes cryptography to guarantee that, not blind faith in the merchant not being compromised by hackers...
- on the other hand I have never had the need to issue a credit card chargeback, so this protection of credit cards was, although real, unneeded, useless to me.