> Spinning a lack of reversible transactions as being a "Benefit" is disingenuous
I argue, through my examples, that reversibility is often not as important as you may think. Another data point: I am a typical American consumer and in 20 years doing probably 5,000+ credit card transactions I have never had to issue a single chargeback at all. So I know for a fact that I would be willing to use Bitcoin for its advantages. Hell, credit card fees which are passed to customers by inflating prices by ~2% probably indirectly cost me north of $20,000 over my 20 years of use. I could have saved $20,000 and I would have been totally fine with the lack of reversibility of Bitcoin. Even if I end up being scammed one day by a non-reversible $1000 Bitcoin transaction, I would still be $19,000 financially ahead with Bitcoin.
> I'm glad you found my story cute, but fail to see how pointing out imperfections in credit card insurance policies is supporting bitcoin, because bitcoin doesn't fill those imperfections
I point out imperfections to show you that even an imperfect system such as credit cards manage to be reasonably successful. So Bitcoin is not perfect either but, similarly, this should not prevent it from being reasonably successful.
> getting my account hacked on a bitcoin exchange
Bitcoin hardware wallets have a huge potential to significantly increase security for consumers.
> The entire world's supply of bitcoin is limited to 2.7 transactions a second
Why do you present this as being a sort of fatal flaw? It's not. A block size increase will solve this. It was not done yet because it's not a problem yet: the average block size is currently still far below the 1MB limit.
> I'm not even going to go into why you would compare Mt. Gox to Madoff. Madoff is an uninsured investor and in prison, Mt. Gox is an exchange and the thieves are where?
I compare the two because both cases are a result of fraud and both cases were/are being investigated by authorities. (MtGox was not robbed, Mark Karpeles committed fraud -- see the willy report -- as a result Karpeles is currently under investigation by the Japanese authorities). You seem to be under the impression the government and authorities are ignoring Bitcoin fraud. They are not. In the US for example the S.E.C. recently prosecuted a Bitcoin ponzi scheme operator: http://www.sec.gov/News/PressRelease/Detail/PressRelease/137...