Perhaps I am naive. My understanding is that in general, debit cards do not enable charge backs. Further, I've never had a fraud alert on my card (even when traveling internationally) that I couldn't resolve with a phone call to the bank. Does a debit card not solve your problem?

It's not the bank that's blocking me, it's the merchant. Since merchants are the ones on the hook for card-not-present fraud, they refuse to ship items anywhere but the address registered with the credit card.

I don't know which debit cards you're referring to but I'm almost 100% sure that the cardholders are not liable for fraud. Meaning someone else along the chain is liable and is monitoring/blocking transactions to reduce that liability.

Sure, but it also doesn't mean we're under any pressure to revolutionise a centuries-old system just to enable those others' extremely niche use case.

For a very large number of people, these aren't "extremely niche use cases."

Something more comparable to Bitcoin than regular banking would be Western Union; they make 5 billion dollars a year in revenue transferring money. And they charge vastly higher rates than the Bitcoin network does, charging in the 5-10% range for for transactions, which is a pretty hefty overhead.

Not the same since it's on the mining, not the transactions, but here we have the founders taking 20% of the value of the network for the first four years. That's a decent overhead, too.

This is not "niche." Every person living outside of the states has this problem. Next time you need something even remotely specific or customized, head on over to amazon.ca and see if you can find the item you're looking for. Then when you can't, think of other countries that aren't directly beside the most consumer friendly country on earth.

> Every person living outside of the states has this problem.

WTF are you saying?

Cross border electronic payments are a pain because many US companies won't ship internationally because merchants are the ones that are liable in cases of fraud.

> I don't want "peace of mind". I (a Canadian) want to be able to buy something online from a US supplier and have it shipped to me in Thailand.

So does anyone else with access to your information. How sure are you that your account info is absolutely secure enough to prevent that AND will remain so for the lifetime of your use of a specific cryptocurrency?

> How sure are you that your account info is absolutely secure enough to prevent that AND will remain so for the lifetime of your use of a specific cryptocurrency?

I'm not, and it's irrelevant because I only have a tiny fraction of my net worth in easily-accessible Bitcoin at any given time.

I'm not advocating replacing bank accounts with Bitcoin, I'm just showing that Bitcoin does solve real problems that traditional payment processors cannot or will not solve.