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by AnthonyMouse 1098 days ago
That's not the problem. If you had cryptocurrency from a lawful business activity in a non-custodial wallet, there are any number of places you can convert it to US dollars, and if you had a dispute with any of them you could use any of the others.

The problem is the easy way to accept cryptocurrency is with a custodial wallet, and then they can be the same kind of jerks as PayPal et al. The premise of cryptocurrency was that it should be decentralized and as yet, it's... not.
1 comments
evandale 1098 days ago
It is decentralized in a way, like cash, but it's not as safe as cash. Technically cash isn't decentralized but for all intents and purposes it may as well be. Especially USD because anyone in the world will accept it.

It's a little harder to scam/dupe someone with cash (especially in the US with USD because of the centralization) and you have the government to help if you receive counterfeit money. That's the part that makes bitcoin fully decentralized and a pain in the ass to deal with other people and trust - nobody wants to help you if you get scammed with bitcoin. You're completely on your own and wholly responsible for anything that goes wrong.

There's nothing stopping you from meeting with someone and sending them bitcoin to their non-custodial wallet to buy their old patio set. There's also nothing stopping you from making a craigslist ad to trade your cash for someone's bitcoin from their non-custodial wallet. Well, except for fear and how sketchy it would be to stand around waiting for a confirmation before handing over the cash. I can admit the fear and sketchiness goes to 11 though and if that never changes bitcoin will never go mainstream because cash will always be better.

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AnthonyMouse 1098 days ago
> It's a little harder to scam/dupe someone with cash (especially in the US with USD because of the centralization) and you have the government to help if you receive counterfeit money.

How is this any different?

If you give someone a stack of hundred dollar bills and they rip you off and disappear where you can't find them, you're out of luck.

If someone commits fraud and you do know who they are, that's still illegal even if you paid them in Bitcoin.

The primary difference is that you can send someone Bitcoin over the internet. And then if they're on another continent your local law enforcement isn't going to have much to say about it and their local law enforcement may not care.

But in many cases that doesn't really matter. How many times do you actually pay anything to disreputable nobodies over the internet? It's mostly established merchants with known reputations that they're not inclined to sully just to rip someone off for a couple bucks, regardless of whether the customer can do a charge back.

It's not the irreversibility that's the problem. It's the UX, or the regulatory overhead, or the network effect. It has to get to the point that Netflix says "hey, Mastercard is charging us 3% and we could avoid that with Bitcoin, why are we leaving money on the table"?

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