
The Bitcoin Fluid Dispenser II [video] - pmorici
http://andyschroder.com/BitcoinFluidDispenser/
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sillysaurus3
I can't wait until people start setting up fakes that simply take your money,
or figure out how to hack these machines into displaying the hacker's wallet
instead of the gas station's. Wanna see a magic trick? Avada Kedavra, poof!
Your money's gone, and there's no way to get it back.

~~~
mikeash
There's a physical presence, so if the owner set it up to take your money and
not give you any product, you should have little trouble getting the police to
take care of it.

For the hacking scenario, I imagine the owner of the pump could still be held
liable for the loss.

~~~
sillysaurus3
There's no way to prove whether the owner was a victim of hacking, or whether
they intentionally set it up to steal people's money. And since the law won't
catch up with bitcoin for many years, consumers will bear the risk in the
meantime.

~~~
mikeash
Why does the law have to catch up with bitcoin? It's just a cash transaction
that happens to use an unusual currency. Fundamentally, it's no different than
a pump that takes cash, which has the same potential for ripoffs. Gas pumps
that take cash aren't common, but vending machines for other stuff are, so
it's not an unprecedented thing.

Bitcoin enables some novel and difficult situations, but this isn't one of
them.

~~~
sillysaurus3
It's a currency with irreversible transactions, meaning there isn't any fraud
protection. With cash, the consumer would get their money back. With bitcoin,
they won't.

~~~
mikeash
That doesn't make any sense. Cash transactions are irreversible too. The
consumer gets their money back not by reversing the transaction, but by
calling in the law and getting large men with guns to force the person to
return the money. This works equally well with bitcoin as it does with US
dollar bills.

~~~
sillysaurus3
_The consumer gets their money back not by reversing the transaction, but by
calling in the law and getting large men with guns to force the person to
return the money._

Actually, consumers get their money back by calling up their credit card
company, saying "I didn't make this transaction," and then the credit card
company issues a refund and a new card. I've done it.

Anyone can be a bitcoin payment processor, meaning anyone can set up a fake
system to steal your money. The best you can do with dollars is to steal a
credit card number, which gets you prison time and no money.

~~~
mikeash
We're not talking about credit cards, we're talking about _cash_ , as in small
green pieces of paper. The law adequately handles cash fraud and bitcoin is no
different. There is nothing for the law to "catch up to" as you previously
stated.

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hawkharris
I can't invest in a low-risk mutual fund without reading five or six notices.
They explain, "Past performance is not a guarantee of future results...There
is risk associated with this investment...etc..."

Why shouldn't companies that encourage consumers to invest in Bitcoins
disclose all the related risks? Granted, I'm thinking mostly of certain
Bitcoin exchanges that pitch Bitcoin as a smart option for personal finance
and savings. Still, companies about doing X with Bitcoin are based on this
premise.

Bitcoin aficionados will see this is a boring or unpopular sentiment,but bear
in mind that I'm not saying Bitcoin isn't a good investment. My argument is
that, from an ethical standpoint, the discussion of risk and volatility should
be built into the way Bitcoin-related startups communicate.

If Bitcoin gets me to work in the morning, what happens when the value of my
investment drops by 50%?

~~~
pmorici
"I'm thinking mostly of certain Bitcoin exchanges that pitch Bitcoin as a
smart option for personal finance and savings"

Can you cite a specific legit exchange that does that I can't think of any.

"If Bitcoin gets me to work in the morning, what happens when the value of my
investment drops by 50%?"

This sort of sentiment is looking at it for what it was not what it will be.

------
vilhelm_s
Double-spending seems problematic. You can't really wait 10-30 minutes before
starting to dispense gas, the lines would be terrible.

~~~
mikeash
I don't really see the problem. Start dispensing gas immediately. Have
surveillance cameras with timestamps that tie into the transaction. In the
unlikely event that you lose out to a double-spend, you have the culprit's
face, his car, and his license plate and you can point the police to him.

Let's not forget that until fairly recently (ten years ago or so?) it was
common for gas stations to let you pull up and start pumping without _any_
payment whatsoever. You went in and paid after you finished. There was
occasional abuse, but it worked reasonably well overall.

~~~
logfromblammo
You haven't had much experience reporting crimes to the police, have you?

If you tell a cop that someone cheated you in a transaction involving BitCoin,
I'm guessing that 80% will laugh at you and tell you to contact your insurance
company and fill out an online property crime report with their automated
city/county system before hanging up, 15% will actually open an investigation
on your gas station for suspected money laundering or tax evasion, and 5% will
actually follow up on your report as you seem to expect they should.

~~~
mikeash
There are dedicated laws for gas station drive-offs and as far as I know the
police take it fairly seriously. In some states you can lose your driver's
license for committing a drive-off.

If gas stations managed to survive the era of ubiquitous post-pay transactions
without being killed by drive-offs, you are not going to convince me that
bitcoin double-spends, which are _vastly_ more difficult to pull off than
simply pulling up to the pump, pumping, and driving away, are somehow an
insurmountable problem here.

~~~
logfromblammo
It is not an insurmountable problem, but the solution is not to let the police
handle it. The police response does not prevent the station from losing money.
It just prevents the same people from committing the same offense many times
in a row.

The reason you have to pre-pay now when you didn't before is that pay-at-the-
pump points of sale make it possible to require it without losing business.
Stations that had prepay-at-the-pump could lower their prices below stations
that did not. The stations that did not have pre-pay did not die off because
all the competition was in the same boat, using the same technology and
exposed to the same risk.

You can't avoid those economics. Your pay-by-BitCoin technical solution has to
be the same order of magnitude time-wise on verifying the payment as credit
card terminals. At the least, your transfer should be verified by the time the
customer is filled up and ready to drive off.

As such, the solution should probably be to take a big transaction to activate
the pump, verify it while the pump is running, and issue a refund transaction
for the unused amount after that verification and before the customer drives
away. If the transaction fails due to a double spend, the person might still
be on the premises long enough for an employee to request an alternate form of
payment. Or use a coin with shorter transaction verification times.

~~~
mikeash
Or the solution could just be to not wait for validation. Yes, it will mildly
increase fraud, and thus costs, but evidently not a huge amount. It could make
bitcoin-gas more expensive than the regular kind, but so it goes. Given the
difficulty of carrying out a real double-spend attack, I doubt it would happen
with any sort of frequency.

~~~
logfromblammo
As long as no other BitCoin-accepting pump can devise a better solution,
whatever solution you have that works as well as a credit-card-accepting pump
should be just fine.

