Can Bitcoin Surpass Credit Cards for Low-Cost Fraud Protection?

It’s almost essential today for merchants to accept credit or debit cards. Indeed, it is often the only form of payment in a customer’s wallet.
However, in exchange for accepting cards, merchants must pay for a number of services that they may not need or want as part of the blanket fees charged by payment processors.
There are even some examples where merchants offer customers a discount in exchange for paying in cash, such as gas stations in the US, which often advertise a cheaper price to customers using physical money.
The card companies, banks and payment processors cooperate together to charge a good chunk of these fees both to cover the cost of fraud and to protect against it. But can bitcoin offer better, or at the very least lower-cost, fraud protection for merchants and consumers?

This post was published at Coin Desk on September 5, 2014.