How is that different from cash? If I give you a $20, no one will know it happened except for us.
Until that $20 or $25,000 is spent on something that draws a lot of unwanted attention - like the BMW parked out front - or until someone (perhaps your wife) becomes aware that assets are disappearing from your accounts.
But how does BitCoin vs. cash change all of this?
If an unexpected BMW appears in front of my house, what difference would it make if I paid cash for it, or BitCoin?
If money is leaving our accounts in a way that my wife did not expect, what difference would it make if it's my wallet, or my BitCoin wallet?
If anything, BitCoin is actually easier to trace than cash. The full history, forward and backward, of each BitCoin is always publicly available. For a supposedly anonymous currency, it sure isn't very anonymous if someone can associate a coin or an address with you.
It takes some pretty careful steps to maintain your anonymity on BitCoin, and I wouldn't trust most people to be able to get it right. Most anonymity-loving people would be well advised to stick with the familiarity and simplicity of cash.
Wal-Mart has been mandating RFID tracking on much of it's stock for years, I'm sure it would be first to the party on RFID tracking of cash.
Why? I can see why they would want to track inventory with RFID, but what benefit does tracking individual dollar bills confer to them?
At any rate, bitcoins, if I understand the system correctly, have the same tracking as RFID dollar bills would have. As the coins get spent and respent, they have a history. In fact, I'd say that bitcoins are more trackable than RFID cash, because you can't really force each individual person carry around an RFID reader to send the details of each transaction they do to the government. But bitcoins carry a history by their nature.
Card: Register with Amazon. Enter card number, name, address, CVV number. Get punted to my bank website to enter randomly selected characters from a password.
If you go through all of those steps, it's because you wanted to. Why do you think Amazon patented 1-Click shopping?
If you turn it on, you can just click "buy" and the product will be on your doorstep 2 days later.
I am thinking if they get an Android App for it, it could seriously take off.
Well, I've got good news for you. There is an Android app! In fact, I think there might be two of them!
So does that mean Bitcoin has taken off? Or do I still have to wait? How long?
I've got an idea. Download the bitcoin app and try to use it. Then, you'll see why an Android app isn't the holy grail. And remember, the reason you have to install your own bitcoin server is that the protocol doesn't scale. The more people use it, the more processing power is required of each user. In fact, the folks who work on the project estimate that if the project ever scaled to the level of Visa or Amex, you'd need a whole server farm just to run a node (I can't make this shit up). I think it's going to be a while before phones have that kind of processing muscle.
So go ahead. Let me know if you still think this thing will ever be more than a niche for privacy nuts, criminals, and economists.
I don't actually know if they make things easier, as I haven't used them. However, I would assume that an all digital currency should be pretty easy to use in a digital environment.
Well, you'd be assuming wrong.
But don't take my word for it. Go to bitcoin's website and see for yourself. Ask yourself, "Self, if I were to buy a book at amazon.com, and they let me pay with my credit card or bitcoins, which would be easier to use?"
Yes, zero advantage, for the overwhelming majority of people who are not privacy nuts, criminals, or economists.
One huge advantage you are missing is that BitCoin transactions cannot be taxed, or at least cannot be proven by the authorities to have taken place for the purposes of taxation.
How is that different from cash? If I give you a $20, no one will know it happened except for us.
All that talk about "control" of currencies, while having some merit, is far secondary to the primary issue: all the true global powers, financial and military both, are directly funded by taxation of some kind.
Are you actually serious here? As though government won't figure out how to tax us in the absence of sales tax or income tax? Well, several states have no income tax (the US didn't even have an income tax until the early 20th century) or no sales tax, but those states still have revenue. How? High property taxes (you gotta live somewhere), personal property taxes (gotta drive something), fees for services (driver's license, business license, etc.), etc.
Making taxation impossible would signal a seismic shift of power the likes of human civilization hasn't seen for a very long time.
Bitcoin does not, I repeat, does NOT make taxation impossible. It just means you'll pay different types of tax, but taxes you will pay.
Bummer that you came in in the middle of the conversation, because we're basically saying the same thing.
The dude who was arguing with me (and indeed the sensationalist FA) were claiming that bitcoin would somehow supplant government-issued fiat currency. My argument is that it will be a niche, novelty currency, at best. It will never compete with the dollar in any real sense.
Have you ever even tried to pay someone with it? You address payments to addresses like "12ctdFqS4gcx5CmQEVRGAqbFKQzriXDo1y". As in, "Grandma, can you please send my birthday money to 12ctdFqS4gcx5CmQEVRGAqbFKQzriXDo1y, this year? Thanks much."
BitCoins have the possibility of making online transactions simpler, due to it's digital nature. However, the question is, do they improve enough over regular debit and credit card transactions for enough people to switch? Especially considering just about every credit card has pretty good fraud protection and 0 liability. What's the fraud protection on using BitCoins?
Does it really make online transactions simpler? Have you ever tried to actually use it?
Is there an Android client? Can I "bump" money to someone like I can with dollars?
You ask good questions about fraud. There is no fraud protection, and all transactions are non-repudiable.
There is just no compelling reason to use bitcoin for the average consumer.
That depends solely on its adoption and acceptance. If everyone accepts bitcoin,
My entire point is that you need to just stop right there. Why would everyone start to accept bitcoin? It's complicated, and it offers zero advantage over federal reserve notes to 99.99% of people.
The rest of your post is a hypothetical scenario that could occur if bitcoin gains acceptance. But I'm not going to grant you that any of your hypothetical will occur until you give at least some semi-plausible scenario where bitcoin might someday gain attention outside the realm of privacy nuts, criminals, and economists.
As the recent bank bailout just taught us, the current system is "Of the people, for the wealthy top 2% and by the wealthy top 2%" as secured by vastly greater sums of money (which is used to exert political power).
Do you have any idea just how much your life would suck right now had it not been for the banking system bailout? I'm not talking about Bill Gates's life; I'm talking about your life. Just read up on previous liquidity crises where the federal government did not step in, and look at what happened to the common man like you and me.
Try thinking outside the box next time, it's way more fun, even if it's a bit loony and gets you sent to Gitmo.
I don't know what the hell you're talking about here, and neither do you.
I think the difference is that the US Government allegedly can't see bitcoin transactions and are thus not taxed (sales or income). Of course cash transactions can accomplish the same thing but I guess the idea is you're more likely to be caught IRL with unreported cash transactions than unreported bitcoin transactions. I call Ponzi scheme on the whole bitcoin thing.
So, in other words, like I said before. This project is only of interest to privacy nuts, criminals, and economists.
Until I can buy food or shelter with it, it isn't that relevant to me. If I take time to do work and only get paid in virtual currency that I can't use for survival, eventually I'll be living on the street and eating from garbage bins. That's because I will have used up my limited resource of time that I could have used to generate revenue that I can exchange for food or shelter.
You can buy food and (poosibly) shelter with it, but as I said in my previous comment, bitcoin doesn't really improve upon government-issued currencies for 99.99% of the population.
In other words, who cares what you can and cannot buy with it? Dollars are accepted by every merchant in the US, and many merchants outside the US, and everybody already knows how to use them. Bitcoin makes complex something that is very simple (forking over some dollars). That's why I don't think it will be relevant in the near future.
You do realize that that "precedent" was set in the US Constitution, right? Congress has the sole authority to coin money. Oh right, this is cpu6502 who is nothing but an idiot troll. Post some more prisonplanet and infowars stories for us. Those are highly amusing.
I think that the difference between this and other digital currencies is that bitcoin is totally decentralized. The US Government will be able to shut down bitcoin approximately as easily as they can shut down file sharing. As in, not very easily.
Still, I don't think bitcoin will become much of a thorn in the rump of any government-issued currencies. It has a pretty steep learning curve, and it doesn't really provide any benefit over government-issued currencies for 99.99% of the population. I think the only types of people who will bother learning how to use bitcoin would be, in decreasing order of value to society: privacy nuts, criminals, or economists.
Actually, you have something of a point there. From my point of view, Binny Boy needed killing, no matter what. If he had waved a white flag, and crawled out of the compound praising America, and kissed every Seal's ass in sight, he still needed killing. I don't care if it was an ordered assasination, or he went down fighting. It just makes no difference.
Would you have said the same thing about Saddam Hussein or Slobodan Milosevic? What makes bin Laden any worse than any other mass-murderer who got a trial?
Or you bust your ass with some small business, suffer, and fall into deep debt. That's much more likely than "becoming a millionaire." Its kinda sad how many people live their lives on the assumption that great wealth is just a couple different decisions away.
Great wealth (billions) is probably not a couple of different decisions away for your average Joe, but decent comfort ($1-5 million) is a couple of different decisions away from most people you'd see on slashdot.
You say you have a side business. Could you grow it? I bet that you could through a lot of persistence. You already know you have a successful business model.
But don't bother answering because I know the answer--it's the same as mine. I just don't care anymore. Growing my businesses takes effort, and I'm old and tired. I'm content to milk the cash cow now.
There are about a thousand individuals in the US with enough political power to get the ball rolling for change in this matter. Of them, their demographics put them with an average age of upper 40's to lower 50's making well over a million each year. Among those who still have kids living at home, to most of them, their thousand dollar settlements is chump change.
Never mind that it's chump change outright to them. What's more important is that it's chump change compared to what Hollywood contributes to their campaigns.
No sane politician is going to jeopardize Hollywood money over a piddly-squat file sharing settlement.
How is forcing people to pay for the usage of the road a bad idea?
I don't think it's a bad idea, per se. But I do think it's about the worst possible way to implement the idea.
We already have a simple way to pay for road usage. It's called the tollbooth. Tollbooths are inexpensive, simple, don't track your movements big-brother style, and can't be defeated easily.
This massive GPS clusterfuck is Obama's worst idea yet.
Well, fair enough. However, I would assume that you have some similar type of consumer protection up there.
And from the stories (admittedly not first hand experience) I've heard, those laws arn't really doing much down there.
Naturally, you're only going to hear the horror stories. People don't tend to whine when the system works as intended. Could it be better? I believe it could. But at the same time, it still works pretty well as long as you act to protect your rights.
I've had my personal information leaked, and people have opened fraudulent accounts in my name. It was a nuisance, but not much more than that. Obviously I'd rather we change the system so that our Social Security Numbers aren't treated as some sort of shared secret, since they're not so secret. In the meantime, we have clunky but sufficiently effective laws in place that let us clean up the mess.
This point troubles me a great deal. The IRS under normal circumstances has 3 years in which to conduct an audit of your tax forms in the US.
Despite what the web user interface may tell you, your bank keeps statements much longer than 3 years. You can order old statements. It may cost you a few bucks, but you can do it.
The credit card is an easy fix, yes... usually they catch it and even if they don't they'll reverse it.
It's when those transactions make it into your credit report that the nightmare begins. You don't have to spend too much time asking around to find horror stories.
Well, yes, you are responsible for looking at your own credit card statements, and alerting your credit card issuer to any unauthorized transactions.
The big risk is in my opinion, to people who don't really need credit at the moment. The people who in 3 years when they go to buy a house find out their credit rating is in the toilet despite never being in debt. This is the part of the system that's fucked up. We need heavy regulation on credit reporting.
You know what? You're right. We definitely need some heavy regulation on credit reporting. We could call it something like the Fair Credit Reporting Act. And while we're at it, we could regulate those nasty collection agencies and debt collectors. We could call that regulation the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act. Lastly, we wouldn't want consumers to be unprotected from billing errors and unauthorized transactions on their credit cards. I hereby propose we regulate that as well. We could be original and call it the Fair Credit Billing Act.
Unfortunately, a lot of people don't know their rights and responsibilities under the law. Indeed, it would seem that some people aren't even aware of their existence. Reading up on them is definitely not a bad idea if you use credit in the US.
I know this is beating a dead horse... but the core problem here isn't Sony's epic failure... it's that the credit system is so broken that this information that was stolen is enough to seriously fuck with someones life.
Stealing a credit card number was never sufficient to seriously fuck with someone's life. US credit card holders are limited by federal law to only $50 worth of liability for unauthorized transactions. Most credit card issuers won't even make the card holder liable for the $50, since that would be hugely bad PR for a small amount of money.
Indeed, my credit card information was compromised in the Monoprice breach last year. Visa saw a few suspicious transactions on my account, shut it down, and called me to let me know what happened. They had already reversed the charges and were sending me a replacement card. The only disruption to my life was having to use a different credit card for a few days.
Slashdot Mirror
How is that different from cash? If I give you a $20, no one will know it happened except for us.
Until that $20 or $25,000 is spent on something that draws a lot of unwanted attention - like the BMW parked out front - or until someone (perhaps your wife) becomes aware that assets are disappearing from your accounts.
But how does BitCoin vs. cash change all of this?
If an unexpected BMW appears in front of my house, what difference would it make if I paid cash for it, or BitCoin?
If money is leaving our accounts in a way that my wife did not expect, what difference would it make if it's my wallet, or my BitCoin wallet?
If anything, BitCoin is actually easier to trace than cash. The full history, forward and backward, of each BitCoin is always publicly available. For a supposedly anonymous currency, it sure isn't very anonymous if someone can associate a coin or an address with you.
It takes some pretty careful steps to maintain your anonymity on BitCoin, and I wouldn't trust most people to be able to get it right. Most anonymity-loving people would be well advised to stick with the familiarity and simplicity of cash.
Wal-Mart has been mandating RFID tracking on much of it's stock for years, I'm sure it would be first to the party on RFID tracking of cash.
Why? I can see why they would want to track inventory with RFID, but what benefit does tracking individual dollar bills confer to them?
At any rate, bitcoins, if I understand the system correctly, have the same tracking as RFID dollar bills would have. As the coins get spent and respent, they have a history. In fact, I'd say that bitcoins are more trackable than RFID cash, because you can't really force each individual person carry around an RFID reader to send the details of each transaction they do to the government. But bitcoins carry a history by their nature.
Card: Register with Amazon. Enter card number, name, address, CVV number. Get punted to my bank website to enter randomly selected characters from a password.
If you go through all of those steps, it's because you wanted to. Why do you think Amazon patented 1-Click shopping?
If you turn it on, you can just click "buy" and the product will be on your doorstep 2 days later.
I am thinking if they get an Android App for it, it could seriously take off.
Well, I've got good news for you. There is an Android app! In fact, I think there might be two of them!
So does that mean Bitcoin has taken off? Or do I still have to wait? How long?
I've got an idea. Download the bitcoin app and try to use it. Then, you'll see why an Android app isn't the holy grail. And remember, the reason you have to install your own bitcoin server is that the protocol doesn't scale. The more people use it, the more processing power is required of each user. In fact, the folks who work on the project estimate that if the project ever scaled to the level of Visa or Amex, you'd need a whole server farm just to run a node (I can't make this shit up). I think it's going to be a while before phones have that kind of processing muscle.
So go ahead. Let me know if you still think this thing will ever be more than a niche for privacy nuts, criminals, and economists.
I don't actually know if they make things easier, as I haven't used them. However, I would assume that an all digital currency should be pretty easy to use in a digital environment.
Well, you'd be assuming wrong.
But don't take my word for it. Go to bitcoin's website and see for yourself. Ask yourself, "Self, if I were to buy a book at amazon.com, and they let me pay with my credit card or bitcoins, which would be easier to use?"
Yes, zero advantage, for the overwhelming majority of people who are not privacy nuts, criminals, or economists.
One huge advantage you are missing is that BitCoin transactions cannot be taxed, or at least cannot be proven by the authorities to have taken place for the purposes of taxation.
How is that different from cash? If I give you a $20, no one will know it happened except for us.
All that talk about "control" of currencies, while having some merit, is far secondary to the primary issue: all the true global powers, financial and military both, are directly funded by taxation of some kind.
Are you actually serious here? As though government won't figure out how to tax us in the absence of sales tax or income tax? Well, several states have no income tax (the US didn't even have an income tax until the early 20th century) or no sales tax, but those states still have revenue. How? High property taxes (you gotta live somewhere), personal property taxes (gotta drive something), fees for services (driver's license, business license, etc.), etc.
Making taxation impossible would signal a seismic shift of power the likes of human civilization hasn't seen for a very long time.
Bitcoin does not, I repeat, does NOT make taxation impossible. It just means you'll pay different types of tax, but taxes you will pay.
You're pretty much proving my point here. Privacy nuts, criminals, and economists. I'll let you decide which group you fall into.
Bummer that you came in in the middle of the conversation, because we're basically saying the same thing.
The dude who was arguing with me (and indeed the sensationalist FA) were claiming that bitcoin would somehow supplant government-issued fiat currency. My argument is that it will be a niche, novelty currency, at best. It will never compete with the dollar in any real sense.
Have you ever even tried to pay someone with it? You address payments to addresses like "12ctdFqS4gcx5CmQEVRGAqbFKQzriXDo1y". As in, "Grandma, can you please send my birthday money to 12ctdFqS4gcx5CmQEVRGAqbFKQzriXDo1y, this year? Thanks much."
So yeah, privacy nuts, criminals, and economists.
BitCoins have the possibility of making online transactions simpler, due to it's digital nature. However, the question is, do they improve enough over regular debit and credit card transactions for enough people to switch? Especially considering just about every credit card has pretty good fraud protection and 0 liability. What's the fraud protection on using BitCoins?
Does it really make online transactions simpler? Have you ever tried to actually use it?
Is there an Android client? Can I "bump" money to someone like I can with dollars?
You ask good questions about fraud. There is no fraud protection, and all transactions are non-repudiable.
There is just no compelling reason to use bitcoin for the average consumer.
That depends solely on its adoption and acceptance. If everyone accepts bitcoin,
My entire point is that you need to just stop right there. Why would everyone start to accept bitcoin? It's complicated, and it offers zero advantage over federal reserve notes to 99.99% of people.
The rest of your post is a hypothetical scenario that could occur if bitcoin gains acceptance. But I'm not going to grant you that any of your hypothetical will occur until you give at least some semi-plausible scenario where bitcoin might someday gain attention outside the realm of privacy nuts, criminals, and economists.
As the recent bank bailout just taught us, the current system is "Of the people, for the wealthy top 2% and by the wealthy top 2%" as secured by vastly greater sums of money (which is used to exert political power).
Do you have any idea just how much your life would suck right now had it not been for the banking system bailout? I'm not talking about Bill Gates's life; I'm talking about your life. Just read up on previous liquidity crises where the federal government did not step in, and look at what happened to the common man like you and me.
Try thinking outside the box next time, it's way more fun, even if it's a bit loony and gets you sent to Gitmo.
I don't know what the hell you're talking about here, and neither do you.
I think the difference is that the US Government allegedly can't see bitcoin transactions and are thus not taxed (sales or income). Of course cash transactions can accomplish the same thing but I guess the idea is you're more likely to be caught IRL with unreported cash transactions than unreported bitcoin transactions. I call Ponzi scheme on the whole bitcoin thing.
So, in other words, like I said before. This project is only of interest to privacy nuts, criminals, and economists.
Until I can buy food or shelter with it, it isn't that relevant to me. If I take time to do work and only get paid in virtual currency that I can't use for survival, eventually I'll be living on the street and eating from garbage bins. That's because I will have used up my limited resource of time that I could have used to generate revenue that I can exchange for food or shelter.
You can buy food and (poosibly) shelter with it, but as I said in my previous comment, bitcoin doesn't really improve upon government-issued currencies for 99.99% of the population.
In other words, who cares what you can and cannot buy with it? Dollars are accepted by every merchant in the US, and many merchants outside the US, and everybody already knows how to use them. Bitcoin makes complex something that is very simple (forking over some dollars). That's why I don't think it will be relevant in the near future.
You do realize that that "precedent" was set in the US Constitution, right? Congress has the sole authority to coin money. Oh right, this is cpu6502 who is nothing but an idiot troll. Post some more prisonplanet and infowars stories for us. Those are highly amusing.
I think that the difference between this and other digital currencies is that bitcoin is totally decentralized. The US Government will be able to shut down bitcoin approximately as easily as they can shut down file sharing. As in, not very easily.
Still, I don't think bitcoin will become much of a thorn in the rump of any government-issued currencies. It has a pretty steep learning curve, and it doesn't really provide any benefit over government-issued currencies for 99.99% of the population. I think the only types of people who will bother learning how to use bitcoin would be, in decreasing order of value to society: privacy nuts, criminals, or economists.
Actually, you have something of a point there. From my point of view, Binny Boy needed killing, no matter what. If he had waved a white flag, and crawled out of the compound praising America, and kissed every Seal's ass in sight, he still needed killing. I don't care if it was an ordered assasination, or he went down fighting. It just makes no difference.
Would you have said the same thing about Saddam Hussein or Slobodan Milosevic? What makes bin Laden any worse than any other mass-murderer who got a trial?
Or you bust your ass with some small business, suffer, and fall into deep debt. That's much more likely than "becoming a millionaire." Its kinda sad how many people live their lives on the assumption that great wealth is just a couple different decisions away.
Great wealth (billions) is probably not a couple of different decisions away for your average Joe, but decent comfort ($1-5 million) is a couple of different decisions away from most people you'd see on slashdot.
You say you have a side business. Could you grow it? I bet that you could through a lot of persistence. You already know you have a successful business model.
But don't bother answering because I know the answer--it's the same as mine. I just don't care anymore. Growing my businesses takes effort, and I'm old and tired. I'm content to milk the cash cow now.
was this because back then not all doorposts had doors? curiousity hit me when i saw doorposts and not door.
Yes, doorposts. Details were important here, because there was a lot riding on getting this one right! (speaking as a firstborn male)
> Only if we schmear lamb's blood on our doorposts.
Jeez, I thought suing your customers was bad... and now you want to ritually sacrifice them????
Lamb's blood, not human blood. Jesus Christ.
So does that mean that anyone with certain Jewish surnames are going to be passed over?
Only if we schmear lamb's blood on our doorposts.
There are about a thousand individuals in the US with enough political power to get the ball rolling for change in this matter. Of them, their demographics put them with an average age of upper 40's to lower 50's making well over a million each year. Among those who still have kids living at home, to most of them, their thousand dollar settlements is chump change.
Never mind that it's chump change outright to them. What's more important is that it's chump change compared to what Hollywood contributes to their campaigns.
No sane politician is going to jeopardize Hollywood money over a piddly-squat file sharing settlement.
FTP? What year is this? 1993?
How is forcing people to pay for the usage of the road a bad idea?
I don't think it's a bad idea, per se. But I do think it's about the worst possible way to implement the idea.
We already have a simple way to pay for road usage. It's called the tollbooth. Tollbooths are inexpensive, simple, don't track your movements big-brother style, and can't be defeated easily.
This massive GPS clusterfuck is Obama's worst idea yet.
For the record, I'm Canadian!
Well, fair enough. However, I would assume that you have some similar type of consumer protection up there.
And from the stories (admittedly not first hand experience) I've heard, those laws arn't really doing much down there.
Naturally, you're only going to hear the horror stories. People don't tend to whine when the system works as intended. Could it be better? I believe it could. But at the same time, it still works pretty well as long as you act to protect your rights.
I've had my personal information leaked, and people have opened fraudulent accounts in my name. It was a nuisance, but not much more than that. Obviously I'd rather we change the system so that our Social Security Numbers aren't treated as some sort of shared secret, since they're not so secret. In the meantime, we have clunky but sufficiently effective laws in place that let us clean up the mess.
This point troubles me a great deal. The IRS under normal circumstances has 3 years in which to conduct an audit of your tax forms in the US.
Despite what the web user interface may tell you, your bank keeps statements much longer than 3 years. You can order old statements. It may cost you a few bucks, but you can do it.
The credit card is an easy fix, yes... usually they catch it and even if they don't they'll reverse it.
It's when those transactions make it into your credit report that the nightmare begins. You don't have to spend too much time asking around to find horror stories.
Well, yes, you are responsible for looking at your own credit card statements, and alerting your credit card issuer to any unauthorized transactions.
The big risk is in my opinion, to people who don't really need credit at the moment. The people who in 3 years when they go to buy a house find out their credit rating is in the toilet despite never being in debt. This is the part of the system that's fucked up. We need heavy regulation on credit reporting.
You know what? You're right. We definitely need some heavy regulation on credit reporting. We could call it something like the Fair Credit Reporting Act. And while we're at it, we could regulate those nasty collection agencies and debt collectors. We could call that regulation the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act. Lastly, we wouldn't want consumers to be unprotected from billing errors and unauthorized transactions on their credit cards. I hereby propose we regulate that as well. We could be original and call it the Fair Credit Billing Act.
Unfortunately, a lot of people don't know their rights and responsibilities under the law. Indeed, it would seem that some people aren't even aware of their existence. Reading up on them is definitely not a bad idea if you use credit in the US.
I know this is beating a dead horse... but the core problem here isn't Sony's epic failure... it's that the credit system is so broken that this information that was stolen is enough to seriously fuck with someones life.
Stealing a credit card number was never sufficient to seriously fuck with someone's life. US credit card holders are limited by federal law to only $50 worth of liability for unauthorized transactions. Most credit card issuers won't even make the card holder liable for the $50, since that would be hugely bad PR for a small amount of money.
Indeed, my credit card information was compromised in the Monoprice breach last year. Visa saw a few suspicious transactions on my account, shut it down, and called me to let me know what happened. They had already reversed the charges and were sending me a replacement card. The only disruption to my life was having to use a different credit card for a few days.