For example, if you buy something on eBay and the seller sends you a brick packed in a cardboard box instead, you dispute the charge on PayPal and most likely get your money back. Or suppose that some pissed off hotel clerk decides to charge your credit card for made-up damages during your stay in a hotel.
My experience is that it’s not hard to get your money back. This is why actual scams tend to involve some step where you convert money into something else—since a wire transfer or ACH transfer can be reversed or at least traced, you have scams where the patsy has to turn transfers into cash or gift cards.
And no, a wire transfer or intra-bank transfer is typically not reversed. Even for big-names, like Linus, it is not so simple and requires personal connections with industry insiders to even get simple cases of fraud reversed.
[1] https://twitter.com/swiftonsecurity/status/15121875924140523... He mentioned it in his long WAN VODs, so there isn't a nice source to link to
At the end of the day, what I care about is that I can safely make a transaction to get something I want in exchange for something that I have. The safety protections involve the ability to identify accounts with real people within the reach of the law, the ability to reverse transactions made fraudulently, etc. If I have US dollars and want something that isn’t US dollars, then I have a ton of safe options to do that (with different protection depending on what I choose). If I instead have some kind of crypto asset and want something that’s not a crypto asset, the fraud protection is much weaker.
Yeah, crypto is kinda bare-metal. Isn’t that a major problem with it?
> And no, a wire transfer or intra-bank transfer is typically not reversed.
Yes, it sounds like we agree on this point. This is part of why most people don’t use wire transfers.
There are, however, conditions where wire transfers can be reversed. Banks are also somewhat proactive about protecting you from making wire transfers. It’s not a service that they offer lightly.
Crypto's closest anologue is wire transfers... which you excluded with the reason of "most people don't use them".
>At the end of the day, what I care about is that I can safely make a transaction to get something I want in exchange for something that I have. The safety protections involve the ability to identify accounts with real people within the reach of the law, the ability to reverse transactions made fraudulently, etc. If I have US dollars and want something that isn’t US dollars, then I have a ton of safe options to do that (with different protection depending on what I choose). If I instead have some kind of crypto asset and want something that’s not a crypto asset, the fraud protection is much weaker.
Again, try applying any of this to wire transfers. Almost all of these concerns apply to both crypto and wire transfers.
>Yeah, crypto is kinda bare-metal. Isn’t that a major problem with it?
What's the issue with having access to a permisionless, bare-metal system?
>There are, however, conditions where wire transfers can be reversed. Banks are also somewhat proactive about protecting you from making wire transfers. It’s not a service that they offer lightly.
That is not reversing, that's simply preventing you from initiating the transfer.
I had thought that this was a comparison of modern non-crypto banking / finance systems to the infrastructure provided by crypto, but you have made it very clear that you consider a more general comparison "out of scope" for whatever point you are trying to make.
The vast majority of people losing money in the crypto world are the equivalent of people installing sketchy extensions in the early days of the internet that perform attacks on unsecured online banking portals. That this doesn't happen more often against banks is largely a function of the gated-ness of browsers and that targetting banking infrastructure (and national-level infrastructure for that matter) is the hot ticket that guarentees getting the undivided attention of three letter agencies.