Topic: Chargeback in Bitcoin, good or bad? (Read 2929 times)

I thought this was in poor taste as a joke, but are you serious?

Try it with an alt (not one that I hold, please). I predict a death spiral to zero value within a few days.

Forcing a chargeback system on everyone is insane. There's nothing stopping a sender from contacting the recipient to request a refund if the situation warrants, same as with any cash purchase. But putting a 3rd party in control destroys most of what makes bitcoin special, sends transaction costs through the roof, and creates a great bunch of new opportunities for scamming at a time when scamming is what is hurting bitcoin the most.

First, Bitcoin as it is, is good.

Second, Bitcoin involves a form of trust.

Third, chargebacks involve a different form of trust.

Some people like chargebacks, some don't. Why not make it optional outside of Bitcoin?

There is a business opportunity here. Start a holding company that holds bitcoins in a trade. The bitcoins would be held for a certain amount of time agreed upon by the buyer and seller at the time of the transaction. After the time is up, the bitcoins are sent to the seller, period. If there is a chargeback, it could be based on terms set up by the buyer and seller ahead of time, up to and including a court order obtained by one of the parties. The holding company need not be set up in such a way that it needs to take part in the negotiations by the buyer and seller.

People would not have to use the holding company for their Bitcoin transactions, obviously. Yet, some buyers and sellers would consider it beneficial to have such a holding company. Otherwise this question would not have the response that it does here in Bitcointalk.

Is such a holding company available already?

Chargeback is not a good feature for bitcoins, initially when i heard about bitcoin, i heard that it was a method of payment which cannot be charged back unlike paypal which is a disaster if you deal with a scammer, if you need more security in dealing with bitcoin and scammer protection use an escrow like localbitcoins.

With bitcoin you are your own bank. After 1 confirmation anyone receiving bitcoin can be confident the funds are received and in their possession. Unlike mastercard,visa, paypal, etc.
I know what I would rather accept

You have to effectively decide for which direction to pursue. Bitcoin chose to go the "non-reversible" way. In my opinion this is the right choice - Bitcoin is mere an asset and not mainly a payment service for companies.

Chargeback is a double sward.

Advantages:
1. avoid scammers
2. BTC is decentralized, chargeback is centralized, so it's contradictory. So NO chargeback is BTC's feature.
3. decrease wrong payment.

Disadvantages:
1. send to wrong person, can't get money back
2. easy to be scammed by scammers.
3. send the wrong amount of money, can't get money back.

It has both positives and negatives and can be used for both good and bad. Being able to do a chargeback is great if you are honest and have been scammed but that same feature can also be abused by the dishonest to scam you.

bad

but in some cases, the escrow is very necessary, especially if one party does not have confidence, it could end up with a fraud, as the saying goes, "provide an umbrella before it rains"

with that example you lose even your fiat money, if you trade things with private user, so it's not a chargeback problem, it's about what the service from  which you buy, offers yes or no a type of return

for example, if amazon was using bitcoin as a payment, you would be assured that in the case you described, they will give back your money(in bitcoin) and you can return their product, and no escrow or chargeback is needed

Yes, this is correct. There needs to be a central authority to support chargebacks. Since BTC does not have it, only 3rd parties building on the top of the chain can do that.

We need to keep that in mind. Bitcoin itself is very useful but it needs to stay a "stupid" network. Chargebacks will be available with services built on top of it.
If you use cash and give it to someone, you won't get it back by just claiming "heeey that's my money".
Services will come and customers will be able to choose if they want to be "safe" by paying for it.

Escrow doesn't work well for all situations. You might receive fast delivery of a product, release the escrow, and 3 days later (for example) find out the product is seriously defective with problems you didn't detect right away.
No payment system is perfect for all situations, and I am surprised the OP is seriously suggesting "Chargebacks in Bitcoin", since irreversible transactions are a primary feature of Bitcoin.   

Let's say Mr. Joe Consumer buys a $10,000 item online and accidentally sends the bitcoins to the wrong receiving address. The Bitcoin Foundation could setup a call center and a toll free number (1-800-BTCBack) to handle these situations.

Transaction fees could be increased to cover any additional costs associated with this new Bitcoin security feature.

Avoid investing in ponzis. You think "chargeback" can help to get Bitcoins you invested? What if the central authority isn't trustworthy? Humans always are unpredictable. If they get a large volume of Bitcoins, they will change. I really hope you understand what you are talking about. They can be small merits for large demerits. Many scammers, probably more than Bitcoin scammers, use PayPal to scam by doing chargebacks.

I don't think chargeback would be good for bitcoin transaction. It will make bitcoin more centralized because one system could control bitcoin transaction. Paypal can do this system (chargeback) because that paypal linked with credit card. So Paypal can chargeback user in next 180 days. If bitcoin address is empty, how can system chargeback that address?
Let the users choose, if they want chargeback, they should use paypal
If they don't want, let them use bitcoin for transaction

You really think the bitcoin foundation can arbitrate and make informed decisions about hundreds, or thousands, or millions, of chargeback disputes every day?  You really think they should?  You gonna pay salaries since you've just advocated them hiring a few dozen to several thousand people depending on transaction volume?  You think everybody should have to trust (ie, be potentially betrayed by) exactly the same agency anyway?

It is like saying the FED should have a chargeback system because the guy you paid cash to for something on Kijiji turned out to be broken.

It is up to the seller to offer a system to return funds and buyer beware.

If you want Bitcoin to be more like cash then invent a Bitcoin credit card just like a cash credit card. Great business opportunity. Then you can have your charge backs when you are ripped off.

I think the bitcoin foundation is probably the best to arbitrate these reversals. A buyer would simply open a chargeback case and if the claim were approved the CSR would send Gavin a note to reverse the transaction using his bitcoin master-key.

The problem with chargeback is that someone has to make the decision about whether to do/allow it, and both of the parties involved are self-interested.  If there were agreement, then there is no problem; the "chargeback" is just another mutually-consenting transaction.  If there is disagreement, then you need someone to decide.

So, any protocol that permits chargebacks must involve a third party whose decision about the chargeback can screw over either the payee or the payer.  And people don't want to negotiate an arbitrator or escrow for every fricking online purchase of a watch.  

What *could* be done in protocol I suppose is for someone to establish "superior claim" on a set of coins and then let people use inferior claims on them to make transactions. When there is a dispute, the person with the superior claim can just invalidate the inferior claim held by the disputant whom *THEY* hold to be at fault, and issue a new inferior claim to the complainant (or the defendant, as the case may be).  

If people want the "safety" of something that courts can seize and redistribute according to the judgements, there is a way to give some agency power over particular assets, without requiring that such power be granted over any other asset.  But it would by definition be a "Trusted" agency - meaning one that can completely screw the security of those assets.  The only benefit of this is that it could be done, for example, to make legal compliance possible where needed, while not impairing the ability of people to trade in assets that *AREN'T* inferior claims.

So you could have, for example, a decentralized stock market, where all the traders are trading digital stock certificates which are inferior claims on stocks where the corresponding superior claims are held by the SEC or other regulatory agency.  So if the SEC really needs to step in and sieze the assets because Bernie Madoff or something, it can exercise the superior claim.

Or if a bunch of merchants can be convinced to accept inferior claims on bitcoins as payment, you could have a bank or other agency which owns the superior claim on money that's in an "account" so they could authorize and unilaterally implement chargebacks against merchants who get the inferior claim in payment.  

It is an interesting but solvable cryptographic problem, although it is not at all clear that the result would be any improvement over fiat.