This suggests you haven't tried paying with bitcoin. Sure, you lose all those things you get with creditcards, but for me some advantages that bitcoin offers over credit cards (and yes I'm a consumer too) are more important, such us:
- I'm not afraid that any of the providers where I have bought things gets hacked, because my identity and payment details is not kept by them.
- Paying with bitcoin is so much easier, I don't need to copy stupid numbers from a card with my keyboard ever again.
- I don't need to check my bank account from time to time to see if I had charges that don't correspond to things I didn't buy.
- I'm not afraid of bank commissions that especially take place when I pay for things abroad.
These are the little things that will make a universal-worldwide-digital-coin succeed. Could be that this coin is bitcoin, or other one.
Aren't you just trading the risk of the merchant being hacked and stealing payment details (which with credit cards, can be fixed by simply issuing a new card) for the risk of someone getting access to where you store your bitcoins (where you effectively have zero recourse)?
That seems like an unbalanced tradeoff from my perspective.
Things may have changed, and this is by no means a critique of Bitcoin as a protocol, but I've had the opposite experience so far.
For online purchases at best, in order to make a purchase, I've needed to copy the address to send payments to, log into my wallet, paste the address, go back and copy a code from the website and paste that in the memo, and enter the correct payment amount. At worst, it's required multiple emails because things were broken.
For online credit card purchases, it's been as easy as clicking a single button (Saved CC info), and having everything simply work. Entering the CC info is a little more work, but I wouldn't say its significantly easier than the Bitcoin experience.
In person purchases are slightly easier, but it still requires some form of taking a picture of a QR code and waiting a minute or two for the payment to go through. With a credit card its as easy as making a swipe and sometimes signing.
I have hope that one day paying with bitcoin will be easier, but so far I haven't experienced this.
