The credit card situation is a completely separate concern, but a very big one. I still don't understand why there's no better international online payment method. There's a great Dutch online payment method, but that's only used by Dutch sites and a few really big ones (like Steam) that can afford to implement national payment systems.

Why that system hasn't been implemented on a larger scale, I still don't know.

My bank offers free Virtual Credit Cards with a configurable limit. I've heard that some US banks (BofA?) do as well. That limits the exposure to the amount of the payment. And you can still chargeback.

Sounds useful if you can make one credit card for each payment. But you first need to configure that before you can actually pay. What we need (and what Netherland has) is something that just works right away where you really only authorize that one payment without exposing any vulnerable information, using the security of your own bank.

At least here, you can make a CC for each payment. It's a simple form: input max amount, click continue, get CC number.

Here in Portugal we also have the kind of payments you're talking about, but it's not particularly easier than the VCC system.

Citi offers this.

That's pretty much what I came here to say. I travel frequently, use my credit card everywhere, both online and offline, and I have never had any fraudulent charges to my cards.

Only once have I canceled a credit card before it expired, and that was after finding out that a popular hostel booking site let the hostel managers look up all credit card details, including the CVV number, for all bookings. I talked to the manager at the place we stayed for a few nights in Lima, Peru, and he told me that the site would only show the details once (or for a limited period), so they would always print the page. Of course they kept the printouts in a binder in the common area of the hostel...

I really don't understand why USA has such a big problem with credit card fraud, and how that problem became big enough that people would actually avoid paying online, with the exception of major chains/processors (Amazon, Paypal, etc).

Although, come to think of it, Denmark is a bit of an outlier. We have a national credit card, Dankort, that was conceived and implemented sometime in the 1980s (I'm a bit too young to remember the details...). It was written into law, and part of the law was that transactions should incur no costs on the user, which resulted in massive adoption, to the benefit of both the banks (who were proponents of the Dankort before its introduction) and the consumers.

There is a better and safer online payment method its called Bitcoin

But the existing financial and payment companies realize that this new technology makes them largely redundant hence they lobby and make it hard to acquire bitcoin for the average person with existing payment methods.

The attitude of banks and regulators towards bitcoin is the same of the motor industry and governments towards the electric car, somewhere between dismissive to fearful.

Give it time tho' I suppose, after all the same arguments were made by many industries against the early web and hell computers for that matter.

Last time I looked at Bitcoin, the big show-stoppers for me were:

(a) the price was so variable that there was no way to know how much I was actually going to pay for anything;

(b) turning real money to Bitcoin and back again was an utterly horrible experience (and expensive);

(c) total lack of any recourse against fraud or theft, plus a rather scary security track record.

Have these got any better recently?

a) Yes, likes of Circle and are solving this with USD balances and instant conversion to btc, also bitcoin has not been that volatile in last year

b) Coinbase a YC company and Circle mentioned already are doing great job on this end

c) Since bitcoin is basically digital equivalent of cash thats like asking for wings on a car. As for security I have a hardware Trezor wallet on my desk which keeps keys secure even if my computer is infected.

You see problems, I see opportunities for startups

The early internet had many problems, those companies that solved these problems are now household names.

People may also not like bitcoin because they want a democratic say in the design and operation of their currency. Bitcoin has economic features built into it that its users simply have no democratic redress to change, even if they wanted to. Power should be to the people, not some guy who likes deflation and baked that in years ago.

Yes because the average person has power over the central banks

Anyways it is sad being down-voted in technical forum by people who should better than most understand that bitcoin despite its faults is still a damned good online payment method especially when compared to existing alternatives.

It does everything the OP i replied to wants.

Anyways fuck this place, people use their votes as a way to not encourage conversation but as a punishment tool.

I get to vote on the people who appoint the fed chief every so often. There is no mechanism, even theoretical, to put that democratic power in the hands of the citizen user of bitcoin.

Edit: Wow you changed your comment a lot in the edit!

Good, bitcoin is not going to replace central banks, what it is a great online payment system not a replacement for world banking.

Some of us have no issues trusting cold hard maths, cryptography and computer science behind bitcoin which give so much certainty and such clearly defined rules for how the system works. As compared to some central bankers who have no issues with whole countries going down the drain (Greece) due to their policies which often change based on politics.

There sure as hell is no chance that trillions of bitcoins will suddenly appear out of thin air Fed style.

I don't think it's true that you can't change how bitcoin works. I'm no expert, but as I understand it, if more than half the network agrees with you, you can change it.

I think the main problem with bitcoin is that it doesn't scale, because every transaction has to be approved by the entire network. More payments and a bigger network means the number of validations goes up quadratically.

"change half the network" doesn't meet any definition of democratic access to power that I am familiar with.

People don't need to do a turn on a garbage collection route to vote on how their municipal garbage service is run.

"change half the network" is almost the textbook definition of democracy.

Democratic access to power has in no other circumstances required knowledge of coding.

The federal reserve system was designed to be resilient against the democratic whims of the people; any minuscule control you have over the management of the US Dollar is a bug, not a feature.

It is responsive to democratic actions even if it isn't directly under the peoples control. Bitcoin, your average citizen has no recourse, period.

To be fair, we're not haggling over 50 cents. We're haggling over 50 cents times however many songs the person plans to buy.

But still, 50 cents extra for a song that she loves and listens to all the time? Heck, we used to spend €20 on that limited 12" with that mind-blowing remix on it, just to get that one track (I'm old).

For these kind of purchases, I have a credit card that allows me to credit virtual card numbers with a limit and expiration that I can set. I'll set the limit to the order amount. If they try to charge more, the transaction is declined.

That, along with the ability to contest charges (chargebacks), makes it a lot less risky.