To be fair to IOTA, this is a single instance of reversing transactions in a case of alleged large scale theft, there is a 'slippery slope' argument, but this is not worse than what PayPal does every day. PayPal will routinely reverse transactions, block access to funds, and will blacklist individuals/entities who are doing things that PayPal does not like, even if not against any rules/regulations that PayPal has published. There is no slippery slope argument with PayPal because they are already at the end/bottom of the slope.
For me to say, “I prefer Paypal to IOTA” is damning Paypal with faint praise—to make a point about IOTA.
My point is that Paypal does what it says on the tin, and does it much more efficiently than anything like IOTA.
This is not to promote Paypal: To the contrary, it is a reductio ad absurdum. If I wanted a centrally-controlled system that is poison to privacy, is cheerful about financial censorship, and can arbitrarily revoke transactions at any time, then I would rather use a system which frankly admits to being exactly that—and which does it using technologies that make sense (I am guessing an enterprise RDBMS), rather than pouring on buckets of snake oil crypto just to make the whole thing look fancier. Or for a different metaphor: IOTA is a Rube Goldberg contraption with the disadvantages of a centralized system, plus many additional complications.
Although I do NOT trust Paypal’s security, and past performance is no guarantee that they won’t later suffer an Experian-tier giant hack or other systemic failure, I will also note that in the past 20 years, they have not suffered the sorts of “oopsies” that IOTA seems to have almost on a regular schedule. Two years ago, the big IOTA news was their broken homebrew hash—two months ago, they had that “corrupted ledger” downtime—now, this... If Paypal had IOTA’s record for security and reliability, would they still be in business?
That Experian is still in business is not a counterargument here: You have no way to opt out of Experian, and their customers are others who are paying them for your information. If Paypal were to suffer extreme and/or chronic security breaches, then I would think—well, I would hope that lots and lots of people would close their accounts and run away! And that is the point of this thread: Avoid IOTA, due to a high risk of losing money.