Are sellers more vulnerable to fraud than buyers when doing business? The Bitcoin white paper says:


  Completely non-reversible transactions are not really possible, since financial institutions cannot avoid mediating disputes. ... Transactions that are computationally impractical to reverse would protect sellers from fraud, and routine escrow mechanisms could easily be implemented to protect buyers.


My understanding is that Satoshi decided to protect the sellers and this seems to suggest that he thought that sellers are more vulnerable to business fraud. (He surely didn't mean that buyers are not important, but his design decision favors the sellers, I think.)

Is there any existing evidence, report, or statistical data that support that sellers are more vulnerable to fraud?
My interpretation is more that, since sellers are the ones receiving money, they are the ones who stand to be protected by an improved and non-reversible payment system.  I don't think Satoshi particularly thought that protecting buyers (who are receiving goods) was less important or that they were less vulnerable, but that it simply wasn't within the scope of the problem he was trying to solve.  He thought that "routine escrow mechanisms" were already appropriate to the task, and in a decentralized currency, these mechanisms can be decoupled from the payment transfer system.