One of the very real problems that cryptocurrency enthusiasts are concerned about (but IMO totally failing to actually solve) is that it seems like a really bad idea to leave such basic functions of state in the hands of difficult-or-impossible-to-regulate transnational enterprises. When will these players realize that they've got more "state-iness" than most actual states, and how will they use it?
In the brave new decentralized "free market" crypto world you are even more fucked if you have a problem. Who do you appeal to? Who decides if your edge case is worthy of rolling back the all mighty blockchain. The DAO folk got the "hack" stuff rolled back so the "thief" no longer had their money. But what about you and your Atari that never arrived? You think the top of the crypto pyramid is gonna roll back the blockchain for you? It can literally become mob rule!
And sure, you can say "build a better smart contract", but I would say that is impossible because then you have to encode every edge case you can imagine and all the ones you can't imagine. And worse, you still need that smart contract to interface with things outside the "trusted" sandbox the smart contract lives in (i.e. meatspace)--which means you need to trust not only whatever is providing that interface but everything beyond it.
Governments exist for a reason. One of those reasons is to be where the buck stops. A society that scales to billions of people needs somebody to say "this is right / this is wrong". It needs a final authority on conflict resolution.
Smart contracts are seriously one of the stupidest things to come out of the crypto space. It really highlights how some engineers think "I am good with computer stuff, so therefore I am also good at economics, government, politics, finance, monetary policy, contract law, etc". The whole idea is really arrogant.
Simple, if you need the extra safety you pay for the service of an intermediary, like PayPal or eBay or (in cryptoland) Purse.io.
If you don't need the extra safety, you don't.
Escrows can be even better with Bitcoin because of multi-signature transactions, the escrow can hold the payment without holding your money, so all they can do is approve the payment or not, they can't change the destination.
Rolling back the blockchain is like going to the government to reverse your $50 transaction, it doesn't make sense.
In the neoliberal world order, government exists to ease the flow of international capital ("These regulations make it hard for us to scale our sales beyond the {US,China,Germany}. Please Mr. President, we need common-sense solutions!"). It has jettisoned its role of solving real problems for ordinary people ("Lord Fontleroy, Biff's dog killed two of my pigs.") as it once did.
If you don't need the extra safety, you don't.
Let me rephrase consumer safety in crypto. Food safety regulations is kinda cool and we feel safe eating out. Now crypto food comes. It's cheaper, but seller now follows it's own understanding of food safety. Or not.
This is a basic insurance market. You can still buy the insurance separately if you want it -- sites like eBay would undoubtedly offer it with nothing more than a checkbox for about the same fee as the credit card companies currently charge for implicitly the same thing.
The problem with the existing system is that it requires you to buy that insurance, even when it isn't necessary. If you order something from Newegg, they're ultimately going to send it or give you a refund, because they're a stable business and it's cheaper for them to make good to begin with than have a small claims court order them to. So you lose 3% in processing fees for nothing -- Newegg is no more likely to not make good than the payment processor is to not reverse the transaction.
The existing system also basically makes micropayments impossible because the transaction costs are too high, but it's not actually all that serious of a problem if you get ripped off to the tune of $0.10 from time to time. The amount is small enough that it doesn't need to be insured, and that allows you to get a good feel for what kind of purchases are scams without actually losing any significant amount of money. It also creates an opportunity for curation services to vouch for verified sellers at a lower cost than insurance would have to be to cover the losses from less savvy individual buyers not knowing who to trust (or not caring when the insurance is mandatory).
It's not the same thing. With chargebacks, in the case of fraud the payment processor almost always extracts the money from the seller, acting both as a deterrent and reducing the cost of the protection. If it was just insurance, it would be more expensive (because there would be less deterrent to (seller-side) fraud and it would cost more to recoup the costs).
It's still possible to do that by having the insurer escrow the payment in cases where you want the insurance, if that's actually more efficient.
But sometimes it isn't. Doing it that way subjects you to buyer fraud where the buyer actually receives the item, claims not to have and has their money refunded. The cost of that has to be paid by honest sellers, which then have to charge higher prices to honest buyers.
And an insurer who can't recover their costs from the seller has more incentive to vet the sellers (and buyers) so that they aren't insuring fraudulent transactions to begin with, which could plausibly have lower overhead than sellers eating the entire cost of buyer fraud.
Different choices may be more efficient for different transactions. A transaction between a reputable buyer and a reputable seller will have low insurance costs even without escrow. A seller with less reputation would have higher insurance costs, but can mitigate the cost by offering to accept escrowed payments but only from more reputable buyers. A buyer with less reputation could do the opposite, buying from a more reputable seller at low insurance cost by waiving the ability to easily reverse the transaction.
Forcing everyone into the same box only creates inefficiency.
The cost isn't due to chargebacks. It is due to the risk of fraud. Criminal behaviour like fraud extracts a toll on society at large and we all get to pay. The overhead added from chargebacks make both the buyer and seller internalize the potential risk of fraud. Without chargebacks, yeah prices might be slightly lower but society at large would get to foot the bill for fraud.
I'm not even really sure what all these posts are arguing for. Someone asked what problem cryptocurrency is supposed to solve, and the GP answered it with a good and succinct answer:
>It's trying to solve the problem of having to involve a 3rd party in on-line transactions.
If other people want other payment methods, that is their choice.
Moving to irrevocable online payments is basically the equivalent of handing a wad of cash to some stranger in a parking lot selling "new, sealed!" ipads out of the trunk of a car.