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This is not a set of outdated practices resulting in ‘risk’ to sellers, it’s deliberate consumer protection.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