[kragen]

Payment reversal is an open invitation to criminals to steal from sellers. A friend of mine had his laptop stolen via payment reversal. Listed it on Craigslist for sale, a woman paid by PayPal and then came by to pick it up, and after she left she reversed the payment. PayPal automatically took her side because he didn't have a shipping tracking number. Cashier's-check scams are another classic form of this crime: https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/8/19/20808526/cashiers-ch... https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/how-spot-avoid-and-rep...

Obviously any payment method that is a layer over credit cards and US bank transactions is going to want to support reversal; otherwise, in cases like these, the payment processor gets left holding the bag. It's not "the result of decades of learnings and trial and error." It's the result of banking regulations which impose huge risks on anyone who receives money through the banking and credit card system, in order to avoid imposing risks on people who send money.

In many cases, those risks are not inherent to the transaction being conducted; they are introduced by outdated banking business practices that rely on detecting rare frauds after the fact and clearing transactions over the course of weeks or months. Instead of removing the risks, current banking regulations force them on anyone who receives a payment, so the banks don't have to fix them. Cryptocurrencies just remove those risks instead of externalizing them.

And that's why so many payment methods support reversal.

[Nursie]

Payment non-reversibility is an open invitation to sellers scamming, something which has been recorded for thousands of years.

You’d have to be historically illiterate to want to throw this stuff away.

I’m sorry your friend got scammed, but there’s a host of damn good reasons we put the risk on the seller.

This is not a set of outdated practices resulting in ‘risk’ to sellers, it’s deliberate consumer protection.

[kragen]

There are indeed cases where transactions involve unavoidable risks, and in some of those cases it is best to force the seller to assume those risks rather than the buyer. (I'm not sure why you've put "risk" in scare quotes; as my examples show, these are real risks.) In other cases, like when I pay the rent for my apartment, or when I sold a used car to a body shop, it would be better for the buyer to assume those risks.

But there are additional, unnecessary risks created by the banking system, and for many transactions (like when the thief stole my friend's laptop, or transactions that result in identity fraud) those risks are the vast majority of the total risk. In those cases, cryptocurrency solves the problem; it doesn't just shift the risk back to the buyer.

[Nursie]

I’m sorry but the vast majority of risk is sellers, always has been, always will be. They may not make up the bulk of fraud now, but that’s precisely because we have these rules.

Your links to checks are fantastic. Who the hell uses checks any more? Wow.

Cryptocurrency precisely shifts the risk to the buyer, their recourse is gone if the goods they get are substandard. The imbalance of power between merchants and consumers is real, and consumer protections like reversibility are there to address this.

Perhaps PayPal is not the best choice for person to person transactions. I am sorry your friend got ripped off, but perhaps as a seller he should do his research about who he’s selling to. Without reversible mechanisms, every buyer has to research every purchase.

[kragen]

It seems that you are becoming upset enough about this conversation that you are losing the ability to either consider the limits of your own knowledge or understand my comments well enough to respond to them. I'm sorry I upset you; that wasn't my intention.

[Nursie]

Having worked in payment systems and also having a reasonable understanding of cryptocurrency, perhaps you could enlighten me as to what the limits are?

Your idea that cryptocurrency would solve your friend’s situation is just plain wrong. It might have solved it for one party, but it does push the fraud risk onto the buyer. If your friend had sold a laptop to an honest buyer, but the laptop died as soon as it left the house, or was of lower spec than advertised, the buyer would have been out of luck.

I’m not sure why you think pointing this out indicates that I’m upset, I can only presume this is tone trolling.

[vishnugupta]

> Cryptocurrencies just remove those risks instead of externalizing them.

Cryptocurrencies unilaterally move the risk to the spender and I don't see how that is same as removing risk. A financial transaction is always risky for all the participating parties, there is a chain of liability. You can't make the risk disappear, someone has to bear it and/or underwrite it. Which is why you have all these payment processors that charge x% transaction fees for merchants in exchange for taking on that risk.

A larger point here is disputes will always arise in a business transaction. Which is why we have arbiters who hear both sides of a story and settle the matters. You can't say "Payment reversal is an open invitation to criminals to steal from sellers." and make payers unilaterally liable for every payment they make. That is a recipe for killing a market.

In your friend's case PayPal acted as an arbiter and given that the seller had no proof of sale PayPal made a judgement call to side with the payer. The harsh reality is your friend should have been more careful or said only-cash-accepted.