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grubles

>when I can just pay with my dollars directly?

Credit card transactions take something like 180 days to confirm. Within those 180 days one can issue a chargeback.

Bitcoin transactions take ~10-60 minutes (depending on the required number of confirmations) and cannot be clawed back.

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Those all sound like good reasons for a seller to take bitcoin but not for the buyer to use it.

As a buyer, you can use multi-signature transactions.

I'm sorry, what?

I still don't understand what I'm missing out on by spending read USD directly.

Sorry, I replied to the wrong comment.

Which only really happens if the customer files a dispute, the dispute is valid, which in turn means the customer is aggrieved. Why would I want to forfeit that ability again?

Here's an example that really happened to me:

I legitimately wanted to use my Canadian credit card to buy something in the US and have it shipped to me in Vietnam but the merchant naturally was unwilling to take on the chargeback risk and I was unable to complete the purchase.

If you're willing to just unconditionally trust the merchant like you would with bitcoin, can't you use a wire transfer (western union etc.)?

A SWIFT wire transfer costs $40 a pop and requires me to visit a branch (which is especially hard to do when I'm 10,000 km away from home). It's also much more annoying for the merchant to accept vs. changing one line of code in their Stripe checkout.

Western Union is also expensive and inconvenient (although somewhat less so than the bank).

You should seriously consider switching banks in that case, what bank doesn't let you do wire transfers online?

I think all of them here in Canada (unless you have some special merchant account). The banks all claim that you won't be held responsible for any fraudulent use of your account online. They wouldn't be able to claim that if you could do irreversible wire transfers.

Where do you live?

I live in Finland, and the whole concept of not being able to send wire transfers from your online banking (or even a phone app) sounds utterly ridiculous.

This seems to be the norm in most of Europe. AFAIK the big US banks let you do wire transfers online too.

That, and the 0.5% transaction fee are great for the vendor. But why should I, the consumer, be interested?

You're really, really into Ron Paul.

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