[rhacker]

How many times has this been used in practice?

Like really - did your friend owe you $200 and you wanted to make sure he couldn't pay you something over square and then call his credit company and say his card was lost?

Like are you a shop online and you wanted to make sure ALL of your customers are paying in Bitcoin so they can't claim someone stole their card?

Are you a party to a lawsuit and the judge decided to oversee the other party pay you (the fictitious plaintiff in this scenario) $50000 with a check and you're worried he's calling his bank afterward and cancel the check?

None of these scenarios would be made better with Bitcoin:

Transaction costs

Some online stores ARE scams and it's better to have a real money trail - especially the ones involving bitcoin

The last scenario is easily solved because the judge would be able to provide much harsher realities for the check canceller.

From a practicality standpoint every time someone talks about irreversible transactions I just eyeroll at the actual logistics of that working in our world of 7B people.

[shuntress]

The fundamental purpose stated in the bitcoin whitepaper is to provide an electronic equivalent to physical cash.

The first line of the whitepaper[0] is "A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another"

In practice some "third" party (bank, paypal, square, venmo, etc) will still be involved in most transactions because of the scenarios you have described. But this would be because they are helpful and add value not because they are necessary.

[0] https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

[mattwilsonn888]

Security is not usually the main use case of a service, but a necessary feature of one. Bitcoin can do many things, and its main use case right now is store of wealth, so with your examples you've demonstrated you don't understand its most basic function.

When you notice that multi billion dollar transactions of Bitcoin are made every blue moon you might not be scoffing at what its security protocol is providing it.

[BTCOG]

Exactly. Although I do want to add that money can be both money, and a store of value. Gold, being the main primary example.

[BTCOG]

Username doesn't check out with logic.

Do you mean to tell me you just cannot understand why some people want money with total finality to use with anonymous people across a network? I mean, at this point I have no argument with you I just can't understand your line of thinking. Cryptocurrency, or digital cash, digital money was an idea for a decade+ before Bitcoin finally solved the problem. It's an obvious money with many obvious use cases. Many thousands of folks around the world are using Bitcoin on a daily basis. It's like the phony fees story people spread about Bitcoin, while those of us using Bitcoin daily can send any amounts of money we like for payments to folks around the internet for a couple dollars.

Let me be totally blunt with you since you are acting clueless as to how people use money on the internets.

I pay people ALL THE TIME, in Bitcoin, for codebase work that they perform. I do not want banks involved, I do not want to know their real life identity, I do not want them to know my identity, etc. Therefore, do the work, I pay you. We have a Web-of-Trust (Something folks here in general just seem ENTIRELY clueless about) and we trust eachother just as far as the Web of Trust and our online chat history and trust level allows. Do people get ripped off at times with payments? Sure. You lost $50 bucks, or whatever. Maybe you'll learn not to trust that party again. It's very simple. You don't need to act clueless. It's money, and if you use it correctly it just works. It's not reversible. If I were paying someone who ran off with my cash, it's the same shit.