If you are a merchant selling goods and services for money, and had the choice between transactions with finality and without, you will always chose transactions with finality.
If customers demand reversible transactions, you will choose reversible transactions or you will not have customers.
There are, for instance, no longer many mainstream online merchants who accept only irreversible transactions. There once was a time when online transactions were primarily paid via money order, but PayPal and credit card processing has made that obsolete.
> If customers demand reversible transactions, you will choose reversible transactions or you will not have customers.
I think most customers pay with credit cards more because of convenience (or rewards, where applicable).
There's a myriad of QR payment systems popping up around the world (e.g. WeChat, UPI, PayNow) that are getting considerable adoption — and those aren't reversible. They're popular because customers don't have to worry about carrying enough cash with them.
You can't compare in-person and e-commerce payments in that way. The risk for the merchant and the customer is completely different:
A physical merchant usually has a storefront in a public place that they can't abandon on a whim, a reputation to lose etc, whereas the customer is usually anonymous and mobile. This is why customers are generally ok with paying using a (to them) irreversible/final payment method, and merchants will insist on it.
In e-commerce, the risk lies almost exclusively with the customer: An online store's reputation is not easy to judge (and brand impersonation is its own risk), and even at reputable merchants, the time between order and delivery is much longer, goods can usually not be inspected ahead of time etc.
Not coincidentally, the various card schemes' rules reflect this circumstance by assigning default liability for online payments to the merchant (or their acquiring bank, in case of a fraudulent or bankrupt merchant), whereas for in-person payments it lies with the cardholder (or in case of fraud with their issuer, in some circumstances).
The landscape of trust online is varied. Someone is likely to have lower trust for random website you’ve never heard of (which was most stuff in the early days) than an established business or one with a physical presence.
Now that online retail is mature and trust is high, credit cards are more for convenience, but this wasn’t the case in the early days… and still isn’t the case for lesser established sellers or marketplaces.
When was this time that online payments were done with money orders? Some of the earliest online merchants that were associated with AOL and Prodigy accepted credit cards. Amazon definitely accepted credit cards from day one.
In the mid to late 90s many retailers online operated like mail-order catalogs with catalogs delivered via http. Many of them were mail-order businesses first, and so they accepted payments for online purchases the same way they did for their majority of their customers.
This was also normal for eBay payments at the time.
There were, of course, a few that did accept credit cards, but many people were weary about using those features because very little of the web used HTTPS at the time. Even Amazon accepted money orders (and personal checks!) for this reason.
Not always. If customer fraud is low and customer wariness is high, you might well find that providing customers the safety of the option to reverse the charge gets you enough more money that it nets you more overall. Even more so if "finality" of the technology means that users instead turn to the courts to dispute your charges.
There is a narrow sense in which the merchant "always prefers finality" but it isn't the relevant sense.
Inflation induces investment and consumption. Ultimately, central bank wants to create GDP growth through inflation because any GDP growth is good, that's the basic dogma.
Since we're talking about climate change, it's clearly morally wrong for the central bank to print money to create arbitrary GDP growth because GDP growth creates emissions and furthers climate change. It's a deathtrap really, and the most sinister mechanism ever created. We should probably ban it along with Bitcoin.
He's just incredibly confused because central banks officials avoid saying the word "money printing" or "creating money" so that the public doesn't panic or accuse them of creating something out of nothing. Instead they use technical words like "Quantitative Easing" and "Asset Purchases" and then dumbasses like him buy into the wordplay whole heartedly.
A low velocity financial instrument is still useful if it stores value, even if it has no other utility. Gold locked in a vault, rolex watch that is stored in a safe, stock whose voting rights are not utilized, a house that nobody lives in, pokemon cards that isn't used in a card game.
The list is endless and I guess if you're really asset poor you wouldn't see a value in these things.
The comment I was responding to was "People ... are fleeing for the exits," which is clearly not the case. The picture given is a stampede, where what's really happening is a few people going to the ATM and placing chips at a roulette wheel.
You'd have to be blind to not see that the "mainstream system" is the one flushing the climate down the toilet.
Bitcoin is just a byproduct of the "mainstream system". It was created by it. It's like the waste product that comes out when refining toxic ancient sludge into oil. And Bitcoin will never go away until the "main stream system" itself dies.
I’m not (only) talking about things like fractional reserve banking and central banks, but of regular nation states that can collect (and do succeed in collecting) taxes.
Bitcoin can simply be banned. It’s not that complicated. Note that the ban wouldn’t be on the tech itself, mining or possession. It would simply be a ban at the points of contact with the regular economy. Basically you can’t exchange currency, goods or services for BTC.
> If nations no longer control their money, does it mean they can go bankrupt?
Yes, happens all the time where countries default on their debt obligations even when they "control" their money.
> Would have the EU and the US been able to create stimulus packages?
Yes its called taxation, and maintaining a reserve. Just like how normal people save up for a rainy day. They can even borrow money (bonds) from the public like they've done for hundreds of years.
> What about adjusting the inflation to the economic growth rate of a country?
The vast majority of failed monetary systems in the last hundred years is due to central banks printing too much money. So maybe we should stop letting the central banks attempt to control something they barely understand?
