Just talking about bitcoin, and not about this specific situation or their adoption: Bitcoin has some minor advantages in technology because the financial industry is slow, but that's not the major reason to adopt. The major reason is trust.

Historically, it's difficult to trust many organizations. The US federal reserve and the US dollar have the best record/reputation in modern history. Top competitors have taken devaluations in WWII and even recently (British pound in 1992, Russian ruble in 1998). That's part of why many people use the dollar. Even now, after 2008, when everyone thought the currency was screwed because money was being printed fast, we didn't see inflation. But the dollar isn't perfect. As recently as the 1970s and 1980s the US dollar experienced double digit inflation.

Bitcoin is an alternative currency with less trust in a central authority. It's got a bunch of other features like you've both been talking about but it's real value add is the lack of central authority (both in terms of volume of currency issued and in terms of your ability to hold your own currency without a 3rd party).

Now, maybe you don't want to use Bitcoin now because you believe a problem with the US dollar or any other local currency is a 'low probability event'. That's totally reasonable. But it's also worth remembering that humans are known to be bad at estimating risk/reward from low probability events. Historically speaking, there will be a currency crisis in the next 50 years. I can't think of any fiat currency has ever gone 50 years without some sort of currency crisis (at least of the ones we have a good historical record of). Bitcoin aims to be the first one to do that. We'll see if it ever does.

>Looking to the future doesn't make me want to transact in BTC right now.

And that's fine. Contrary to popular belief, most core Bitcoiners are not particularly interested in "converting" non-Bitcoin users. There was a big group that bought Bitcoin as a (risky) investment in fall of last year who try to pump it up, but they don't even share many of the core values of the Bitcoin community.

I do want people to be educated about their rejection of Bitcoin (i.e., "because tulips" is just annoying). But it sounds like you are making an education call.

So that's fine. I don't think traditional fiat is at any risk of becoming obsolete in the foreseeable future. We can co-exist side-by-side.

I hope you can afford us the same respect.

PS: I do strongly disagree with "bankless people need banks". Bankless people need to not be exploited, and the kinds of banks that accept people poor/no credit are usually not ethical/moral organizations.

With that sentence, I meant that bankless people suffer hardship because they can't get access to basic banking services like savings accounts, currency exchanges, and money lending.

Simply because a financial institution that provides those services transacts in bitcoin doesn't make it any more ethical/moral than a traditional bank. While it's true that bitcoin doesn't have a central monetary authority, you still need a gateway to exchange currency for BTC (currency exchange), some way to safely store your private keys (savings accounts), and lenders.

For most bankless people, a trusted third party is going to be involved somewhere along the way, BTC or not.

>With that sentence, I meant that bankless people suffer hardship because they can't get access to basic banking services like savings accounts, currency exchanges, and money lending.

That's exactly who I'm talking about. And I think this will be the group who adopts Bitcoin, because there's a lot of friction in that market. Bitcoin is being seeing major adoption by markets with significant friction (silk road -> gambling sites -> ?).

>While it's true that bitcoin doesn't have a central monetary authority, you still need a gateway to exchange currency for BTC (currency exchange), some way to safely store your private keys (savings accounts), and lenders.

I agree that there will be a transition period.

No comment on my call for mutual respect?

Sorry, just saw this - am I being at all disrespectful?

I had no intention of doing anything other than striking up a conversation with people with a different viewpoint and more information than me.

- Chargebacks happen when cards are stolen. Cards are stolen because they are fundamentally pull payment methods. Every time you pay, you hand the keys to your money over to someone else. Think about this for a second, because it is absolutely insane.

Whenever you pay with a credit card, you have to trust the merchant to (1) charge the right amount, (2) only do it once, and (3) themselves take your privacy seriously enough to not have your information stolen by another party, who, if they did get hold of your card info, could abuse it at will and then share with more 3rd parties or have it stolen from them!

Credit cards are broken fundamentally. If the only kinds of payments were push payments, where consumers choose when to pay and the merchant has no ability to pull at will, the entire issue of credit card thefts - think Target, Home Depot, or the Russian hackers - would simply not exist.

So chargebacks due to fraud simply wouldn't be there. Sure, there are other use cases for chargebacks, like you felt you didn't get what you paid for or something, but that switches to a customer service issue which increases competition among merchants.

- Who cares about volatility? You don't need to own bitcoin to use it. When you want to send it, buy it at the time, then send it. Big whoop.

Also what is volatility on $100? Are you that concerned about losing or gaining $5, $10, $20 in a day, with a total maximum limit of losing at most $100 if it goes to zero, which seems extremely unlikely? Nobody said you have to invest your life savings. Participating in the technology is as expensive or as cheap as you would like.

- "Bankless people need banks, not cryptocurrencies." - Why? You didn't actually say.

"There's no difference to a bankless person between a mobile app to an online bank and a bitcoin gateway." - Which is great, because since "people need banks" (your words), bitcoin can finally provide it to them.

- "My credit card pays me back a chunk of that "1-3% tax on everything," my bitcoin wallet doesn't." - This is short-term thinking. Wouldn't you want something that can provide lower fees to gain market share in the long term, so that discount is not just available to the exclusive group of people who qualify for nice credit cards, but to every person, regardless of qualifications or payment methods?

- Last point is covered by my first point.

> So chargebacks due to fraud simply wouldn't be there.

That is far from the only reason there is credit card fraud. Actually most credit card fraud is linked to identity fraud (a hacker stealing someone's financial credentials or posing as them on an online/offline store).

Most of the credit card information stolen from Target and Home Depot is not used but sold as quickly as possible on underground forums to "the greater fool" who is willing to take a risk to use it (if it still works).

Because of the chargeback system, those millions of credit cards stolen are not a huge issue for consumers because they can immediately lock down their card. Cards are replaceable keys. If you believe that you've been compromised, chargeback for whatever amount was stolen from you and change cards. It's a pretty incredible system for consumers when you think about it.

Contrast that to bitcoin. Your third-party bitcoin storage service gets hacked, your bitcoin are gone forever. You choose to store your bitcoin locally and you're exposed to physical theft (like keeping cash under your mattress).

Bitcoin does not solve the fraud/theft problem. I facepalm every time I hear that argument. Chargebacks are omnipresent today because they protect consumers because theft has always been and will always be part of any financial/payments system — simply because thieves don't target "how" you pay (push vs pull doesn't matter) but target where you store your wealth.

> thieves don't target "how" you pay (push vs pull doesn't matter) but target where you store your wealth.

I wasn't arguing against this. Your credit card is where your wealth is stored, if it can be used to purchase things. And your wealth is stored with Target if they have your CC info. So places like that seem a likely target for attacks.

> Contrast that to bitcoin. Your third-party bitcoin storage service gets hacked, your bitcoin are gone forever.

M-of-N key schemes will prevent this in the future. Also not the only option.

> You choose to store your bitcoin locally and you're exposed to physical theft (like keeping cash under your mattress).

I don't see how. If your stuff is encrypted or your devices locked, then they would not be susceptible to theft from your mattress. They'd have to be stolen from your hand while unencrypted or device unlocked.

Not sure that I buy that most CCs are somehow gotten through a means other than 3rd parties who have them.

Another point is that if you get your info stolen, why should the merchant take the loss? They've already given out the product. It's your money to be responsible for, if the merchant doesn't hold the means to charge it, which they wouldn't with bitcoin. This realization will lead to more secure systems, since consumers would not be able to charge back willy-nilly.

> Your credit card is where your wealth is stored.

Your credit card is just a means of payment (a key). Your wealth is stored at your bank.

All these merchants may have your bank keys, but they can't use it to charge you illegally because they will incur costs (a chargeback fee and then some). It a great system in which both the consumer and the merchant are incentivized to behave correctly...

- Getting rid of charge back fraud also gets rid of charge backs - an important consumer protection.

Chargebacks actually suck. In the Netherlands the majority of online payments are made with Ideal, all banks are linked to it and it doesn't have chargebacks. It's awesome, cheap, fast, every bank participates and virtually everyone uses it. It's not just theory, the chargeback thing isn't even a problem, it's not a consumer protection that's needed or asked for.

Why is this so? Because of the nature of business. A business, like Amazon, has a brand. It's in business for decades, makes billions of dollars doing legitimate work. The moment Amazon takes $400 for a new phone and doesn't send it, then lies about it, and does this quite a few times, that's the moment the billion-dollar brand and business collapses. The chance that Amazon will scam you and you needing to resort to a chargeback is 0.

What about the other way around? What's the chance that I, with one of the 100 creditcards I can get, make an account, for every creditcard I have, and send $400 for a phone, receive the phone, then do a fraudulent chargeback? It's small, but it happens. Despite this also being rare, it happens orders of magnitude more often than the other way around. Now Amazon is out of a product and out of $400. It costs them too much to prosecute me (their 0.35% profit margin on that sale won't cover 10 seconds of their lawyers). All they do is blacklist the creditcard.

As you can see, this system invites fraud. It rewards criminals in a way that's pretty easy to get away with half of the time. Amazon now loses money, which means it (and every other business in the world) increase their prices a little bit, charging honest customers. We collectively pay for this consumer protection that is often used for fraud.

Guess what, bitcoin can have chargebacks TOO. IF a consumer really wants it, let him go to a third-party business and say look, I don't trust Amazon, I will pay 1% extra for you to insure the delivery. If I don't get the product, you pay me back the full amount and deal with Amazon yourself if you want. That market will arise if there is demand for it. Difference? In this market ONLY the people who don't trust the merchant they pay for the risk. (very rarely do I buy from a business I don't know, can't locate on a map, or that doesn't have a business registration, and as such I have never in the past decades of my life done a chargeback). All the other people now don't have to pay for the chargeback fraud.

Not only is this cheaper for all but it's also more equitable. Chargebacks ARE useful in one circumstance, which is when e.g. you bought 1 month at the gym, and they keep charging you for 12 months. But bitcoin doesn't have this problem because it has PUSH payments. YOU decide when to pay (excuse the arrogant capital letters lol, I know). Credit has pull payments, of course in a system where anyone can take money from your account is it useful to charge that back. But that protection has no need in a push-system.

- I don't need 10 currencies I'd be comfortable holding

Point is that there are hundreds of currencies, and most are shit. So while I'm comfortable holding my currency (euro), and you probably your dollar (as would I), that luxury doesn't extend to a few billion others for whom bitcoin may be viable. As for your quote of bitcoin volatility, I'm talking long-term here. A currency that goes from 1 to 100 to 1000 to 1m users of course is volatile. But when that settles down, the inherent inflationary properties (generally the root of volatility issues in any economy) have low-volatility.

Besides that, I already mentioned you can lock in the price of bitcoin in a national currency. I'm not saying we should all HAVE bitcoin, but I'm saying we can benefit from using it. That could indeed mean regular joes owning $100 (in bitcoin), pegged to the dollar price built on a back-end derivative market for investors, and using it as if it was paypal. That could happen, too. People are working on that, e.g. the founder of CNET who launched Bitreserve.

- My credit card company provides fraud protection for when my card is stolen, my BTC wallet does not

Circle, Xapo and Coinbase all insure bitcoins already, more insurance services will inevitably follow. The point is, whatever creditcard theft happens that you get reimbursed for, someone has to pay for it, and that someone is you and everyone else, and the amount it costs you and everyone else is the average cost of theft per person. Same with bitcoin. But if bitcoin has more secure properties (and I believe it does, push vs pull, lower chance of fraud, multi-sig, no possibility of getting your wallet stolen), then whatever it costs to insure against bitcoin theft will likely be lower on average than the cost of insuring against creditcard theft, meaning it's a cheaper system. Any of today's financial services can be offered for bitcoin, too, but due to its generally better properties, at a cheaper rate. That's why it's so cool. Bitcoin is a protocol-layer, you can build anything on top if you want.

- Until bitcoin gains market share

Agreed that there are quite a few issues that may not be issues if bitcoin gains market share. A bit like the internet: until internet speed becomes faster, I'm not going to be able to make phonecalls, videochat, download movies, watch live news etc on my computer, or hell even my phone - guy in 1995. That's not a reason to walk away, it's a reason to be excited.