> Merchants wont use it. They love no chargebacks and no real fees, but we can't guarantee they will ever get the money for the sandwich they just sold.

A guarantee isn't what you want. Cash and card isn't guaranteed either — the cash might be counterfeit; the credit card might be stolen.

What you want is to reduce the rate of fraud. So let's compare the rates of fraud between bitcoin and cash/card. Credit card transactions are fraudulent around .1% of the time. [1] But I've never even heard of retail bitcoin fraud with zero-confirmation transactions. Have you?

You seem to be afraid of the wrong thing, and you don't seem to be basing your opinion any facts or statistics. It sounds like you're just untrusting of new technology. Yet you're on hacker news? This confuses me. How did you get here?

Similarly, your fear of replace-by-fee is very strange — that proposal is never going to happen. You don't have any faith in the bitcoin community, but you have faith in credit card companies not to raise fees or block your business? Why is that? Do you only trust old boys' clubs? Are you from the east coast? Are you a luddite?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_card_fraud