Say you sell a camera to someone using a stolen credit card.

The real owner of the card gets his money back after doing a chargeback. The thief keeps the camera. The merchant loses a camera, the money, and gets a ding in his credit card merchant reputation.

Bitcoin, on the other hand, is sided on the other extreme. The merchant has almost all the power. However, the merchant still has a reputation, which might be sufficient incentive.

Neither are airbags in cars, yet the government stepped in and made them mandatory.

> [Credit card companies] all have the incentive in the world to start rolling out chip and pin technology.

No, their incentive is to make sure people keep using credit cards.

They've done the math and concluded that the amount of user confusion resulting from chip and pin technology resulting in less credit card use is less than the cost of fraud. The fact that chip and pin works in Europe, and also that credit card processors still exist in Europe proves that implementing chip and pin isn't going to drive Visa and Mastercard out of business.

> Neither are airbags in cars, yet the government stepped in and made them mandatory.

that's simply untrue.

http://www.riskworld.com/news/97q1/nw7aa029.htm

this testimony is from 1997, and even with mostly first generation airbags in play at that time it's still wrong.

They are even more effective at saving lives now, and many of the problems with passenger side airbags have now been alleviated.

saved lives = saved money (unless you're looking at cost-to-state of an entire life rather than cost-to-state for medical/funeral costs, but that's outside the scope of this)

* the replacement will be when folks like Square, PayPal, etc grow large enough that merchants can replace credit card systems with them for a decent % of customers