> With a credit card, you pay with a simple number that anyone can just steal, and if you don't take care, you're fucked.
You seem to deeply understand credit cards. There is practically no risk to using them. As a consumer, your fraud liability is zero and entirely shifted to the merchant.
Of course you should pay off the bill every month. I never pay interest, rewards more than cover any fees I pay (I average 4-5% return on credit card spend), and I really don't know what risk you're talking about.
> As a consumer, your fraud liability is zero and entirely shifted to the merchant.
If you have one with chip+PIN, as all in Europe, 100% of liability is with the customer.
So you have to check the statement every month, go through a lengthy process to appeal false charges, and end up not getting your money back either. Especially as you have to deal with your bank to get the money back instead of the CC company here, and the bank has a far easier process for reversing debit transfers than CC bills.
I am providing examples why the American system is worse in a European legal context.
You don't want CCs either. CCs solve security by having someone simply pay for every time a fuckup happens, instead of using cryptography to prevent them in the first place.
You seem to deeply understand credit cards. There is practically no risk to using them. As a consumer, your fraud liability is zero and entirely shifted to the merchant.
Of course you should pay off the bill every month. I never pay interest, rewards more than cover any fees I pay (I average 4-5% return on credit card spend), and I really don't know what risk you're talking about.