As a random Joe I use a credit card like everyone else. And if the item doesn’t arrive, Amex gives me a refund. Because it can do that, and it has a fraud department.

Of course, Amex deals with small instances of fraud all the time and has built that into the cost, and that’s why I or the merchant pay for the privilege.

For larger things, like actual large international theft, the government absolutely does step in and seize assets.

None of this is possible with crypto, despite what you say.

You can’t seize assets if the destination wallet key is only in someone’s head. You can wrench attack them, but that’s the only option. You better not torture too hard because once the key is gone, the coins are unrecoverable.

The only way it’s possible for there to be recourse even if the scammer is noncompliant, is for there to be a fiat money system. The only way around this is for there to be protections on top of crypto, which is antithetical to it: sure, you can have exchanges where the exchange gets a copy of every key, in case of government order, but then you’re talking the same government orders you’re trying to avoid. You can have the government order everyone to consider certain wallets “stolen” and compel everyone to not accept them, but that’s more government interaction that crypto was entirely designed to avoid.

You can either have decentralized currency, or government protection, but not both.

> You can wrench attack them, but that’s the only option.

That's not the only option for a government. You don't need those specific coins, you only need anything of value. Their car, their house, the wages their employer would have paid them, anything else they'd already bought with the money, etc. And they're criminals, they're going to jail, and they're staying there a lot longer if they don't give back the money, which has a way of making non-compliant people more compliant without hitting them with a wrench.

> The only way it’s possible for there to be recourse even if the scammer is noncompliant, is for there to be a fiat money system.

That doesn't give you recourse either because they can spend the money right away. Which transaction are you going to reverse if they use it to buy a physical commodity or foreign asset? Then the scammer has the asset, not the money, so the only thing a fiat money system can do is cause the victim to be the innocent asset seller instead of the potentially negligent or actually in on it person claiming to be the original victim.