<i>&quot;If you get it wrong, there&#x27;s no recourse. If you accidentally send some bitcoin to the wrong address, you are hosed.</i>&quot;<p>Although this is true, the fact is that in practice this is rarely occurring. No system needs to be absolutely <i>perfect</i> to compete reasonably with the legacy financial banking system. As you point out yourself, the banking system has flaws, and yet it kind of works. Ditto for Bitcoin: it&#x27;s not perfect, but it works quite well at solving certain real-world problems.<p>I think theft of Bitcoin private keys is a more serious problem than accidentally sending coins to the wrong address, however this is being solved by hardware wallets, N-of-M transactions, etc.