- Getting rid of charge back fraud also gets rid of charge backs - an important consumer protection.

Chargebacks actually suck. In the Netherlands the majority of online payments are made with Ideal, all banks are linked to it and it doesn't have chargebacks. It's awesome, cheap, fast, every bank participates and virtually everyone uses it. It's not just theory, the chargeback thing isn't even a problem, it's not a consumer protection that's needed or asked for.

Why is this so? Because of the nature of business. A business, like Amazon, has a brand. It's in business for decades, makes billions of dollars doing legitimate work. The moment Amazon takes $400 for a new phone and doesn't send it, then lies about it, and does this quite a few times, that's the moment the billion-dollar brand and business collapses. The chance that Amazon will scam you and you needing to resort to a chargeback is 0.

What about the other way around? What's the chance that I, with one of the 100 creditcards I can get, make an account, for every creditcard I have, and send $400 for a phone, receive the phone, then do a fraudulent chargeback? It's small, but it happens. Despite this also being rare, it happens orders of magnitude more often than the other way around. Now Amazon is out of a product and out of $400. It costs them too much to prosecute me (their 0.35% profit margin on that sale won't cover 10 seconds of their lawyers). All they do is blacklist the creditcard.

As you can see, this system invites fraud. It rewards criminals in a way that's pretty easy to get away with half of the time. Amazon now loses money, which means it (and every other business in the world) increase their prices a little bit, charging honest customers. We collectively pay for this consumer protection that is often used for fraud.

Guess what, bitcoin can have chargebacks TOO. IF a consumer really wants it, let him go to a third-party business and say look, I don't trust Amazon, I will pay 1% extra for you to insure the delivery. If I don't get the product, you pay me back the full amount and deal with Amazon yourself if you want. That market will arise if there is demand for it. Difference? In this market ONLY the people who don't trust the merchant they pay for the risk. (very rarely do I buy from a business I don't know, can't locate on a map, or that doesn't have a business registration, and as such I have never in the past decades of my life done a chargeback). All the other people now don't have to pay for the chargeback fraud.

Not only is this cheaper for all but it's also more equitable. Chargebacks ARE useful in one circumstance, which is when e.g. you bought 1 month at the gym, and they keep charging you for 12 months. But bitcoin doesn't have this problem because it has PUSH payments. YOU decide when to pay (excuse the arrogant capital letters lol, I know). Credit has pull payments, of course in a system where anyone can take money from your account is it useful to charge that back. But that protection has no need in a push-system.

- I don't need 10 currencies I'd be comfortable holding

Point is that there are hundreds of currencies, and most are shit. So while I'm comfortable holding my currency (euro), and you probably your dollar (as would I), that luxury doesn't extend to a few billion others for whom bitcoin may be viable. As for your quote of bitcoin volatility, I'm talking long-term here. A currency that goes from 1 to 100 to 1000 to 1m users of course is volatile. But when that settles down, the inherent inflationary properties (generally the root of volatility issues in any economy) have low-volatility.

Besides that, I already mentioned you can lock in the price of bitcoin in a national currency. I'm not saying we should all HAVE bitcoin, but I'm saying we can benefit from using it. That could indeed mean regular joes owning $100 (in bitcoin), pegged to the dollar price built on a back-end derivative market for investors, and using it as if it was paypal. That could happen, too. People are working on that, e.g. the founder of CNET who launched Bitreserve.

- My credit card company provides fraud protection for when my card is stolen, my BTC wallet does not

Circle, Xapo and Coinbase all insure bitcoins already, more insurance services will inevitably follow. The point is, whatever creditcard theft happens that you get reimbursed for, someone has to pay for it, and that someone is you and everyone else, and the amount it costs you and everyone else is the average cost of theft per person. Same with bitcoin. But if bitcoin has more secure properties (and I believe it does, push vs pull, lower chance of fraud, multi-sig, no possibility of getting your wallet stolen), then whatever it costs to insure against bitcoin theft will likely be lower on average than the cost of insuring against creditcard theft, meaning it's a cheaper system. Any of today's financial services can be offered for bitcoin, too, but due to its generally better properties, at a cheaper rate. That's why it's so cool. Bitcoin is a protocol-layer, you can build anything on top if you want.

- Until bitcoin gains market share

Agreed that there are quite a few issues that may not be issues if bitcoin gains market share. A bit like the internet: until internet speed becomes faster, I'm not going to be able to make phonecalls, videochat, download movies, watch live news etc on my computer, or hell even my phone - guy in 1995. That's not a reason to walk away, it's a reason to be excited.