[mpyne]

> One time my bank just canceled my card without giving me any reason besides 'security' and mailed me a new one. What would I have done if I were traveling at the time or needed to buy something in the meantime?

What would you do if your wallet.dat were obtained, unlocked and emptied out while traveling? Being able to call your bank while you're traveling to get stuff sorted out is a feature, not a bug.

Of course, you'd probably just point out that you're not dumb enough to use a simple passphrase and that you can protect your wallet.dat.

But that's not going to apply to the majority of people who currently shop online, which is why the current system, where merchants and banks cooperate to detect fraud in many cases even without consumer help, is so important.

You can't do that at all when running your own Bitcoin payments, and if you use an exchange to do so on your behalf then you leave yourself liable to being irreversibly MtGox'ed.

Bitcoin certainly didn't invent fraud and embezzlement but it doesn't make people immune from that either, and Bitcoin-using schemes which fail to account for that are dead-men walking.