Topic: Transaction reversability would be a BAD thing - page 3. (Read 4913 times)

You seem to be misunderstanding how things work now.

If someone, say your granny, has their bank account accessed as a result of phishing, and all the money taken out, the bank will make her good.

She will not lose a penny.

If you want Bitcoin to replace the dollar, you need the same functionality available to the same credulous non-technical people.  

It already is reversible. As long as the counter-party agrees, they can send the money back to you.   

A credit card transaction, as opposed to a cash or irreversible transaction, is different in that the payment processor is acting as an escrow agent.  Money in a credit card transaction is reversible until the sender can no longer reverse it.  The payment processor may extend credit to the merchant to spend those funds until that point, but that is an extra service of the escrow agent/payment processor.

There isn't a need to change how bitcoin works to use escrow.

So you are saying we need reversability, to avoid hackers and man-in-the-middle attacks? Imo, the abuse of the reversability would be a lot worse. Instead take precautions so you don't get hacked or mitm'd.

If you want your transaction reversed, just ask the other person to send you the coins back!

/thread

Check out Mastercoin savings addresses.

That's how online commerce works now.  Why do you think Bitcoin would not work if it has the same protections as the dollar?

That is a respectable position to take if you have no interest in widespread adoption of Bitcoin.  Some of us do want to see it widely adopted.

I think this has been discussed enough, and I don't hear new arguments. Reversal of transactions is possible if the receiver wants to, if not, he only risks fraudulent chargebacks. For all other 'distrust' issues, you go for escrow services, which is also reversible.

I'm not understanding any advantage to this.  Why would someone choose to accept coins that could be reversed?  Either sender is paying or they are not.  If you aren't comfortable with paying up front, the you need to get the receiver to extend you credit - they ship and trust that you will pay up on receipt.   If the transaction is escrowed, then human judgement is involved -- the escrow agent needs to make a fair decision in the case of a dispute, that's not a problem you can solve with just math.

Besides, adding such a system is ripe for abuse -- it would give the Nigerian scam new life.

Not having Transaction reversability is what makes Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies unique compared to credit cards for example. Lets leave it that way.

Its not just dishonest sellers.  People are always having their bank account details phished.  The banking system protects them by making good any money stolen by the phisher.  If the idea is that Bitcoin can replace fiat currency, a similiar reversible system will be needed.

But what if the seller is dishonest? You sent BTC and then didn't receive what was expected.

With reversibility, seller is at risk, with non-reversibility, buyer is at risk.

Its s good idea.

Take a quick read of this: http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/161829/EverythingWeKnow.pdf

Reversibility is needed if Bitcoin is ever going to see mass adoption.  I know people say "Only stupid people get robbed" but the vast majority of people have been scammed at some point and a reversible transaction layer is going to be needed.

MoonShadow, Cbeast, and I all mentioned that a variant of what you proposed may be possible using the bitcoin scripting language.

As a community, we have only scratched the surface of the possibilities offered by the existing protocol.  This is why the necessary tools are not yet available.  I believe you can implement what you want if you spend some more time researching (I know you said you briefly looked).  Perhaps developers like Gmaxwell, J Garzik, Peter Todd etc can give you some hints.  

There are opportunities for innovation with more advanced scripting (and still using bitcoin "as is").

I am finding it amusing that half of the posts are saying optional reversibility would hurt bitcoin, and the other, more-informed half, are saying it is already doable through the protocol.

I'll read up more on the scripting possibilities.  I am a little bit skeptical they will be sufficient to address the hacking risk that I am trying lessen though my proposal.  Why are they not used to greater effect already?  In the current incarnation, the scripting solutions seem quite complex at best, leaving them as an option for experts or offered as third-party solutions.  Isn't it better if we can avoid third parties where possible?

Which original sender... do I have recourse if my private keys were compromised?

QuestionAuthority - I want to send you 1 BTC.  I am going to send it to you from an address I control that is setup with a 5 hour hold.  After 5 hours have passed, is this bitcoin less valuable to you than any other bitcoin?

The chargeback period would have a defined, mathematically enforced time limit.  You just have to wait out that time limit.  My proposal doesn't give either the merchant or the customer the upper hand over each other, it just gives them both the upper hand over hackers.  A merchant would have at least two options for removing all chargeback risk. 
1) Make it policy to not accept any transactions which are from reversible addresses or
2) Wait until the possibility of reversal had expired to ship the goods.

Option #2 is what merchants would do.  If you were silly enough to send a payment to Overstock that had a 1 week hold time, you would just have to wait a long while before they shipped your stuff.


Having an option to slow it down, yes, that is the point.  As my proposal states, you would create an address that was encumbered.  You would do this by choice because you wanted to give yourself time to review any and all outputs from that address.  You would do this to protect yourself against hacking.  The drawbacks of slowness would you be yours alone.  If you didn't think it was worth the marginal benefit, you wouldn't set up a encumber address and you wouldn't add any funds to it if you did.  You're right, hackers would steal the unreversible funds first.  It's up to you what kind of security you want to implement.

You're just slowing everything down.  You're saying that instead of transactions clearing instantly, they essentially linger between the parties for however long you set this reversal period.  The marginal benefit to safety this adds compared to the huge decrease in transaction speed is not a worthwhile trade-off.

Furthermore, if users have the option to send both reversible and non-reversible transactions, hackers will just send non-reversible transactions.

You don't need this.

Just use the escrow features already built into the bitcoin protocol.

Require the original sender to sign the transaction for it to be completed and there you go -- reversible transactions.

I was looking in the scripting docs for bitcoin but first of all half of the commands are "disabled" and I can't find anything to make reversals possible for a certain time or dept. And honestly, I think it's a bad idea.

There's a lot of big wealthy companies that agree with you OP. I just kind of thought we were tryin to be different.

If your computer is hacked I dont think theres anything youre gonna do to reverese it