Topic: Why bitcoin? - page 3. (Read 3014 times)

Well, let's see...

1) first and foremost, reversible transactions open up a wonderful new world of petty fraud, especially for companies selling digital, ephemeral products (such as ebooks, or software, or online services) because delivery of those is problematic to prove outside some pretty in-depth interpol investigation.

I can trivially buy a PDF from your online store, rip it, then claim you never delivered. Paypal specifically will nearly always side with the buyer.

As you might guess, that makes people selling digital products and services online very very sad.

Also, if you are a freelance artist, for instance, I could pay you with paypal P2P, then reverse the transaction after I receive your artistic work. Good luck proving act of delivery to Pain Pal.

2) Paypal specifically arbitrarily restricts countries to/from which transactions can be made. Since I am from [REDACTED], that sucks balls.

3) Fees for online payment systems (especially credit card ones) are relatively complex and high. Bitcoin fees are pretty low, especially if you don't need transaction to be confirmed ASAP

4) There are legitimate reasons to be unwilling to expose your personal information to some third party, for instance:

• some people happen to live in police states you know. Not the kind of police state Americans like to cry about, the "they check your documents on the street, ze horar, ze horar". The kind of where you get arrested and beaten (possibly to the death), then jailed (in case you were not beaten to the death) for running an unlicensed wifi AP
• After the Sony fiasco, even a legitimate customer of a legitimate business in a fluffy happy free country  should think twice before exposing personal details to said business, especially so if the business is technically not subject to fluffy happy country's jurisdiction

5) Bitcoin is decentralized and thus quite resilient to local outages, be they due to State meddling, criminal agents, or natural events. That's a huge boon.

Decentralized - there is no central authority over bitcoin.

No one can print more bitcoins when the limit of 21mil is hit.
No one can stop you from sending your bitcoins to someone else (wikileaks being a popular example)
No ridiculous fee's (other than 1 cent or whatever (believe it's even lower) for transaction fee) for sending someone money.

There isn't really any big advantage for the regular person other than that there's basically no fee's.

Pretty sure there are other reasons to use bitcoins, but those 3 are probably the most important things.

As strictly a consumer you are currently paying a premium (let's say 5% on average) above what the goods could cost if Bitcoin was the payment system used since it does not rely on some of the archaic thinking that has led us to the banking system we have today.

It's similar to how the Internet brought everyone cheap publishing abilities.

If you want to be a small time merchant, there's nothing that comes even close to being able to rival Bitcoin in low startup costs and overhead.

I realize this sounds like trolling or baiting for a reaction, but this is a legitmate question, that I would like to discuss.

I first heard of bitcoin when the silk road website hit the news. I poked around a bit, thought it sounded interesting, but it was way too soon to make any serious judgement. I meant to keep some tabs on it and see what happened, but it fell off my personal radar.

It was brought back to my attention when the link aggregate website I used made a passing reference to the troubles bitcoin has seen over the last month. Double so when the article it linked referenced pattaya- Where I currently live and work. So I've spent two days running through these forums and other new material. I have a lot of personal opinions, but I'm not looking to start a flamewar.

What I have is a single question- one that in two days, I've only seen one website attempt to address, and even then it was given very perfunctory treatment. Why bitcoin? The bitcoin FAQ assumes I understand this, or skips it.

 I'm Joe Average. I buy things online, predominately off Amazon, occasionally Newegg or Ebay. I have a paypal account, but I rarely use it- Really, only for Ebay. Either way, I have never run into a problem with either my bank, or paypal.

It seems like there is no real discussion- It's assumed that the people who read bitcoin websites understand the need for bitcoin. Or there is just no need to explain to others why bitcoin is superior to using a bank/credit/paypal system. There is a phrase I've seen used in probitcoin comments on articles. "Bitcoin will change the world" What I'm asking here is for clarification. Why/How?

On the wiki, there is a short section devoted to the question of Why bitcoin- but the points made feel.. debatable and a touch hastily done. I'm not sure I see the value in irreversible transactions, for instance. I like the idea that if something goes wrong, I can dispute charges relying on something more then the good nature of whatever person now has my money.

So I'm wondering if anyone here would like to explain the benefits for the average member of the public to use bitcoin rather then actual hard currency, or the current paradigm of credit and debt for online purchases?