[goodplay]

>they're very valuable if and only if you cannot use the protection [..]

I don't think that's entirely fair. They're also valuable to those who want to transfer money without ridiculous fees, excessive bureaucratic friction, and many mandatory middlemen.

What other system would allow you to instantly be able to accept payments without giving an exorbitant portion of your revenue?

[slg]

But the "ridiculous fees, excessive bureaucratic friction, and many mandatory middlemen" are what buy you the protection. The fees from necessary middleman seem ridiculous when nothing goes wrong, but that is how Visa pays for a chargebacks or fraud protection. The governments bureaucratic friction might seem excessive, but that is how they ensure people are paying their taxes which goes to fund the court systems that help mediate disputed contracts.

[phlo]

Regulation can greatly improve things.

Within the Single Euro Payments Area, credit transfers (i.e. bank transfers) have been free for almost a decade and will be instant (<10s), effective November of this year. Another regulation, Payment Services Directive 2 will bring more open access to bank accounts as well, requiring banks to provide access to APIs.

Relatedly, the EU also limits interchange fees for credit and debit cards (to 0.2 and 0.3%, respectively). This is the reason why integrators like Stripe charge 1.4% for European and 2.9% for non-European cards.

Payments can be quick, simple and cheap. All you need is some competition, or regulation to favour end-users' interests.

[mcherm]

Yes, but that comes at a price. It means that banks and financial institutions cannot make the same level of outrageous profits -- or at least not without finding different income streams.

[icebraining]

Only a small part of those fees and frictions actually pay for that protection, and in the CC system, a good chunk of that protection is only needed because the system is almost designed to be abused.

But more importantly, that protection money becomes actual protection money, since you can't opt-out. I've bought a lot of used stuff over the years to strangers using cash, deliberately abdicating that protection. Yet if I want to do that online, I can't.

[closeparen]

Ridiculous fees, bureaucratic friction, and mandatory middlemen are exactly how I would describe converting the BTC someone transferred to you to a usable form (by exchanging to your local fiat currency).

[and0]

I'd really love to step into this magical world cryptoconcurrency advocates invented where modern banking is impossibly terrible for most people to utilize, and Bitcoin is easier and has lower fees (it doesn't).

This invention or exaggeration of issues with modern banking just shows how weirdly desperate these people are for a problem their get-rich-quick scheme actually solves.

[gregschlom]

This is fixed by creating new services and/or fixing regulation where needed. A good example of that is TranferWise which turned what used to be a horrible fee laden process into something as simple as fairly priced as it can be.

Fix the banking system. Make new banks. Whatever. You don't need the blockchain for that.