I'll talk about PayPal, not having had much experience with AP (some) and GCO (none).

Let's start with the fee structures. I can almost understand transaction fees for credit card payments given they are passed on to Visa/MC (though I am sure PP does not pay anywhere near as high transaction fees that they charge others). However, for payments from PayPal balance, the fees are atrociously high for not a lot of benefit. This is untenable if you want micropayments, and is really f'n annoying for stuff that is not "micro". When I give the recipient money, I'd like them to receive almost all of it -- possibly commensurate to the actual fees Visa/MC extract with a tiny percentage and no per-transaction fee for PayPal. Right now you're fleecing on balance-payments.

Dispute Resolution -- it takes quite a while. It may have to. Over the years PP has improved on this a bit by opting to freeze specific transactions and not entire accounts -- though this is at the whim of whoever decides something is "suspicious".
Moreover, looking at it from the perspective of a seller, if you want to keep your account, you are pretty much pressured into acquiescing on any and all disputes. PayPal, while charging a LOT of money for their services, shifts the responsibility for fraud towards the recipients of any transaction. Considering it is an eBay company, this is rather an interesting choice -- if I sell something on eBay and the buyer complains about not receiving his item or receiving a degraded version thereof, there is nothing the seller can really do to disprove this -- in the case of physical goods there may or may not be a shipping slip (but let's get real here for a minute, for private transactions the cheaper shipping options do not always provide those) which PayPal may or may not accept -- if you go "digital", there is nothing you can show. If a seller receives a dispute notice on a transaction, they can write it off right then and there. No chance in hell PayPal will eat it. Notice how this also does not give PayPal any incentive to increase account security, fraud protection, etc. You can claim that PayPal "cares" about this regardless, but why should it ?

PayPal acts like a bank, holding a balance, freezing transactions, etc -- at the same time it does everything in its power not to be regulated like a real bank in most jurisdictions. If I go to a bank in Germany to do a transaction, there is regulatory oversight with teeth in these cases. PayPal ? Fat chance.

There have been enough cases of PP freezing recipient accounts entirely; they may state a reason, but that's not worth the email it was sent in. This seems to happen when an account suddenly gets a bunch of payments from many sources. Maybe this has changed and ONLY the "suspicious" transaction are frozen now, but given history, I would not bet on it. Specifically, I would not want to use PayPal for any purpose where there is a possibility of a decent influx of transactions. I can go down to my bank's main offices and resolve issues in a matter of hours, if not minutes, should they really arise. I cannot do so at PayPal, and it can take weeks for them, dragging their feet.

Unfortunately some of the directions PP is going in are the same directions other payment/cc networks and regulatory bodies are going; as such your suggestion to use cash wherever possible is one I try to follow where possible. Businesses actually often prefer it -- the marketing blurb goes that handling real money costs more money than handling credit card or debit card payments -- this may be true if that is all you accept, ever, but if you accept cash (and who doesn't), you have those costs either way and save on the transaction fees (which are considerable especially for low volumes). In addition I actually get true anonymity. The amount of bullshit and crap spam even moderate use of eBay will yield to your inbox ... argh. I would love truly anonymous debit currencies, but realize it ain't gonna happen. Too bad, really.

Actually, I'll let your statement stand on its own as ample demonstration. Your choice of words, ad-hominem attacks, and general inability to converse intelligently make my point for me.

Option 3 : those complaining it's too complex are beyond help from a simple chart and need to get a better basic education. A chart that has 3 settings "Panic" "Tremble" and "Pie" would not exactly help educating -- it would just be a command-chart not even giving you the option to come to your own conclusions.

You love hyperbole, don't you ...

The facts remain, in any given field there are people more qualified than yourself to give advice and implement useful solutions. Good leaders (elected representatives) recognize this and get the best advice they can, instead of only what they want to hear, or "advice" from people patently unqualified to give any on the field in question.

And yes, when it comes to a nuclear meltdown scenario, I want the elite of nuclear power research to have much more of a say in what should happen next than an incompetent moron whose suggestions would just as soon cause supercriticality as being utterly worthless. While even a blind squirrel finds a nut sometimes, I don't want that chance to be taken. Likewise for other fields I am not an expert in.

There is moderation in this process since the decisions get made by elected officials. If they are any good, they will heed good advice.

First of all, you are not a citizen of Japan.

Second, you have a right to speak, but no right to be heard.

Third, if you decide to speak, and if you get the ear of somebody who can effect changes in policy, you damn well better present a coherent case. In order to do that, you need to have researched the topic at hand. A "gut feeling" based on some two-bit tabloid and a moron talking head on TV is not research. Anything else is irresponsible.

Given your statements thus far, I'm inclined to be disinterested in anything you have to say. You may be right on something, but I don't like the chances. I'd rather get my advice from somebody level-headed.

I'd be somewhat surprised if MS got /all/ the C&C hosts for this botnet. It would be surprising if they were all situated within the US, for one thing.

Maybe they did enough research to effectively cripple the botnet for now, anyway. But I would not be surprised if the botnet is doing just fine and new redundant C&Cs are being set up as we speak.

Greed. Sure they don't want to support paper checks anymore. But they want to offer "new" services for less money even less. Banks operate on the principle that nickle and diming their customers is the best foot forward, and any services offered for "free" are just to get them in the door or offer a competitive advantage they'd rather do away with were it not for the pesky morons a decade or two ago who thought free cheque processing should be something to compete on.

This is by design. The effective untraceability of cash has long been a "problem" for police states such as the US and most European countries. They will make sure no other form of monetary transfer developed from hereon our will ever have that same design flaw. All you need is a boogeyman (for most people, money laundering mafiosi type stories will be sufficient, for the rest use terrorists and child molesters) and suddenly you get access to a vast database of who exchanges money with whom for what when and how often. And it will most definitely not be used primarily to catch aforementioned boogeymen (which can still just deal in ... cash. Or bearer bonds. Or goods). Bonus points for slowly making people who use cash seem suspicious and giving cash an air of criminality (for 500€ notes, for instance, there are bunches of stories about how they are used by criminals).

Things like anonymity or even just simple privacy are not desired. Which is a shame -- I don't exactly want all my trading counterparts to know my physical address, or even my name. Not because of what I am doing being shady in any way, but I simply do not trust most people to use and discard, let alone protect, my data responsibly.

God forbid they don't extend credit to people unlikely to be able to repay it. That would be, like, like selling mortgages to people who can't afford them. That is what America is founded on !

Certainly there will be unforeseeable bankruptcies. The vast majority of them is foreseeable, however.

Vi Hart : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jG7vhMMXagQ

There's tau, pie, and pi in that video. In order of importance.

I am of the exact opposite opinion.

You left out Mexican politicians and drugs. Or Swiss bankers, really. The point is that the mere transfer of funds to a region is not indicative of illegal behavior. If you have intel on a specific person in that region and transfers going to/from him, excellent, now you might have a case. Even Japan has criminal elements -- hell, everybody and their mother even knows their name.

Yes, it is. Indicators, as you so eloquently call them, need to be captured. There are doubtlessly very valuable "indicators" in phone calls. We wouldn't be investigating anything other than the records that ping, and then dig into it. This is clearly for the good of the people.

You are making the case that infringing on people's civil liberties and rights is a good thing if it prevents terrorism. My point is that you are using very broad strokes fueled by xenophobia and prejudice if you do what you advocate; it's only reasonable to do the same for other groups (be they homegrown terrorists, non-islamic terrorists, etc.) Who knows whether Sweden is not facilitating the development of a new IRA !

You are not getting the point. These decisions are case-by-case and with oversight by a different branch of government. You can't just stop making the case because somebody else made some other case that resulted in the same outcome you are looking for.

You and I value these things differently then. In my eyes, it does.

The presentation from the 27th Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin last December (http://events.ccc.de/congress/2010/Fahrplan/events/4060.en.html) is available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bkg3AjY6fs or http://mirror.fem-net.de/CCC/27C3/mp4-h264-HQ/27c3-4060-en-attacking_mobile_phones.mp4 .