I'm not sure it's such a great network, when you look at the ability of one service (SatoshiDice) to effectively overload it to the point some people started leaving their transactions out of their blockchain calculations.
As a consumer I also actually like the chargeback and other protections afforded to me by paypal and credit cards.
--edit-- I'll add that technically I think it's a fantastic achievement, and as an amateur crypto-geek it's fascinating. The people who came up with the scheme and have coded it have done a great job (though there are the aforementioned scalability problems), but I disagree with almost all the design decisions that went into the vision of the thing.
As a consumer I also actually like the chargeback and other protections afforded to me by paypal and credit cards.
The flip side is higher price charged by merchants due to higher processing fees. Not to mention that paypal will close down your accounts whenever they feel that you are too suspicious.
Of course, with bitcoin, merchants will charge lower fees since they no longer have to worry about chargebacks. Nobody also can't prevent you from spending bitcoin as you like(as long it's your personal wallet).
As I said, I actually like these features of paypal and CCs, even if prices are slightly higher as a result. I definitely agree that competition in this space would be good, but I don't think throwing out consumer-friendly features is the answer.
To me, "no longer have to worry about chargebacks" is the same thing as "can take your money and run, and there's nothing you can do about it".
Credit cards are a completely different model. When you hand someone your CC, you say, "please take exactly the amount of money I'd like you to and no more. Oh, and don't take any money out in the future, either." Only stolen bitcoins have this problem.
Not really. You're saying "I authorise exactly this amount of money and no more", and if they then take any more or don't deliver the service it's fraud, and you're protected from that by consumer credit law (at least you are here in the UK).
Raw bit-coins can't do fast transactions without risking double spends. Which limits you to a ~20 min checkout process or using 3rd party services then you deal with whatever their rules are.
As a consumer I also actually like the chargeback and other protections afforded to me by paypal and credit cards.
--edit-- I'll add that technically I think it's a fantastic achievement, and as an amateur crypto-geek it's fascinating. The people who came up with the scheme and have coded it have done a great job (though there are the aforementioned scalability problems), but I disagree with almost all the design decisions that went into the vision of the thing.