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Comment by knocte | Hacker News Reader

>Credit cards are simply better for the consumer

This suggests you haven't tried paying with bitcoin. Sure, you lose all those things you get with creditcards, but for me some advantages that bitcoin offers over credit cards (and yes I'm a consumer too) are more important, such us:

- I'm not afraid that any of the providers where I have bought things gets hacked, because my identity and payment details is not kept by them.

- Paying with bitcoin is so much easier, I don't need to copy stupid numbers from a card with my keyboard ever again.

- I don't need to check my bank account from time to time to see if I had charges that don't correspond to things I didn't buy.

- I'm not afraid of bank commissions that especially take place when I pay for things abroad.

These are the little things that will make a universal-worldwide-digital-coin succeed. Could be that this coin is bitcoin, or other one.

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I'm not afraid that any of the providers where I have bought things gets hacked, because my identity and payment details is not kept by them.

Aren't you just trading the risk of the merchant being hacked and stealing payment details (which with credit cards, can be fixed by simply issuing a new card) for the risk of someone getting access to where you store your bitcoins (where you effectively have zero recourse)?

That seems like an unbalanced tradeoff from my perspective.

Which is easier: securing only 1 hardware wallet, or securing the HUNDREDS or THOUSANDS of merchant systems that your credit card information flows through?

For almost everyone on the planet the second is easier. People are bad at security.

It is very rare for people in countries where cards have PINs to both lose a card and give away the PIN to the thief. Banks have educated customers well enough to not write the PIN on the card.

Likewise, a PIN-protected Bitcoin hardware wallet is reasonably pretty secure. You would need a thief with professional equipment to decap the secure chip to access data in the EEPROM that would otherwise be PIN-protected. I would trust this any time over the merchants systems which routinely get hacked over and over.

If it's pin protected then either it has to be used with another system that can lock out pins or I can build a robot to try all pins using simple plans from the internet. Problem solved. So how does this device help again?

Also it's quite common for people to give their pin to thieves it happens at ATM stick ups all the time. The difference there is in cases where they are forced to withdraw money they aren't liable(it's considered the bank being robbed not them) and in cases where the thief takes the info and runs they can call the bank cancel the card and not be out anything.

Clearly you have no idea how secure or tamper resistant chip technology works. To prevent such brute force approaches, they are designed to limit the maximum number of attempts, before they permanently disable themselves, which prevents you from trying all combinations.

As to liability, I have pointed out in this HN thread multiple instances where customers are in fact held liable (60-day rule, stolen PIN).

What happens if I forget my pin then?

Your 1 example requires the person to not check their statement for 2 months. That means there is a 2 month safety window. Do you have numbers on how many people actually have that problem vs the numbers for the ones it works fine for? I would put money on the former being less than a hundredth of a percent

Your second one has been debunked where you originally posted it

> Your second one has been debunked where you originally posted it

Uh no. I gave sources to prove it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8920067

> What happens if I forget my pin then?

It could be handled the same way as when you forget your credit card PIN. Contact the company who sold you the hardware wallet and who verified your identity when you purchased it, and they could reset it: each wallet could have a rescue passcode that only the company knows. You see, Bitcoin is flexible enough that it lets us develop whatever infrastructure we want on top of it. Even though this service does not exist yet, if it is something people want it will likely be created.

So if your friend Bob wants no one to know his rescue passcode or his identity for ideological reasons then he would himself be responsible for safeguarding the rescue passcode. But if you, sanswork, don't trust yourself to memorize the passcode, buy a hardware wallet from such a company. Either way, you or Bob have a choice of having a wallet work the way you want it to work.

> Your 1 example requires the person to not check their statement for 2 months.

Not necessarily. There are other tactics that scammers use to defeat chargeback protections. For instance they will delay the shipment after you purchase. They will claim multi-weeks long delays due to depleted warehouse stocks. They will ship to a "wrong" address. They will ship the "wrong" item and take time to re-ship the correct one. During all this time they will be all nice and apologetic to make it look like these are simple honest mistakes. After the 60-day limit passes, they cut contact with you, you realize it's a scam, you try to charge back, and you realize you can't! You were not aware of the 60-day limit. The scammers have your money. You are screwed.

If you fail with your wallet there is no recourse and you're out of luck. If any of the "HUNDREDS or THOUSANDS" of merchant systems fail you are not held responsible and in the worst case get any missing funds back after a small waiting period. Usually the worst thing that happens is you'll have to update a couple recurring payments, but they'll sometimes even help you with that (Amex!).

I'll take the CC please!

You are wrong, in many cases the customer has no recourse for credit card fraud: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8918865 People think credit card anti-fraud measures are perfect. They are not.

I don't think anything is perfect, but with BTC there is a 0% chance of recourse. I'll take the option with a ton of consumer protection law and someone to sue over the Wild West any day of the week.

These consumer protection laws protect you regardless of the manner of payment: bitcoins/dollars/whatever.

You CAN and SHOULD use the legal tools at your disposition (lawsuit, small claim court, FTC/BBB complaints...) if you get scammed after paying in bitcoins. You definitively have a chance of recourse. These tools work, that's why we have them.

For example the U.S. Securities Exchange Commission successfully prosecuted Trendon Shavers (he was running his scam denominated in bitcoins).

The consequences of failing to secure my hardware wallet are that I lose all my money.

The consequences of failing to secure a merchant system are that I have to get a new credit card and maybe click the "dispute" button on my bank website a couple times.

> Paying with bitcoin is so much easier, I don't need to copy stupid numbers from a card with my keyboard ever again.

Things may have changed, and this is by no means a critique of Bitcoin as a protocol, but I've had the opposite experience so far.

For online purchases at best, in order to make a purchase, I've needed to copy the address to send payments to, log into my wallet, paste the address, go back and copy a code from the website and paste that in the memo, and enter the correct payment amount. At worst, it's required multiple emails because things were broken.

For online credit card purchases, it's been as easy as clicking a single button (Saved CC info), and having everything simply work. Entering the CC info is a little more work, but I wouldn't say its significantly easier than the Bitcoin experience.

In person purchases are slightly easier, but it still requires some form of taking a picture of a QR code and waiting a minute or two for the payment to go through. With a credit card its as easy as making a swipe and sometimes signing.

I have hope that one day paying with bitcoin will be easier, but so far I haven't experienced this.

Seems like Apple Pay addresses most of your concerns. But, when you say you are not afraid of getting hacked. What about bitcoins stolen from mt gox/bitstamp ?

That is mtgox/bitstamp getting hacked. I only use exchanges for buying/selling bitcoins, not for storing them.

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