Topic: 90 minutes for 1 block... - page 3. (Read 7104 times)

ya I love it when I get to pay 5% and have to wait 3 days to send money overseas too.....

90 minutes? 0.001%? Outrage!

This isn't logical. If too fast is bad then Ricky Bobby was wrong.
If you ain't first you're last.

We need to calculate the chances of this. If it did get really long, I am pretty sure people would throw all the computing power in the world at it to get all the built up transaction fees.

in fact the bitcoins were not reversible the the second they were send.

it just took 90 minutes to confirm it was a good tx.

I wonder that the odds are for a 90min block?

imagine we get really unlucky and hit a 3 year block 

Just because it wouldn't make sense, doesn't mean people won't do it anyway.

You can't just keep switching to new coins. Is their some reason bitcoin can't be improved upon?

I think this problem can be fixed by being more open to zero-confirmation transactions, especially when we're talking about <50 BTC. Let's face it, if someone managed to manipulate the protocol, it wouldn't make sense for them to use it to scam people out of relatively tiny amounts.

Confirmations just give you a risk assessment…1 confirmation by the Bitcoin network should give you a whole lot more confidence than 4 Litecoin confirmations.  The Bitcoin network has a lot more computing power protecting its network.  If there was some way you could estimate how much computing power is currently working on a block that includes a given transaction, that would be a pretty decent way to assess the risk of a transaction even before it's in the first block.  If mining pools sold subscriptions to their feed of lower difficultly blocks, you could make these kinds of assessments (you could also look at p2pool).  You could observe the mining power working on blocks that include your transaction and make a risk assessment long before the first real block.  As the mining power including your transaction increases it may cross a threshold where you accept the risk (and the threshold would be dependent on the value of the transaction).  This would be a far better way to assess the risk of a transaction than the various transaction radar approaches.

How well is litecoin doing these days?

Bitcoin very rarely gets 90 minute blocks, I don't see it as a major problem. Also, due to the p2p nature of the network it's actually not a smart idea to make blocks much faster than they currently are, just like gmaxwell explained.

The popularity or usage of Bitcoin has in my experience absolutely nothing to do with the speed of the blocks. Nothing. There are far more important issues. Use green addresses or something if you really want speed.

I can understand the need for faster confirmed transactions in some cases but for the vast majority of my needs (and I believe the vast majority of everyone's) Bitcoin would be perfectly adequate.

For low amounts (I'd say <$100), transactions without confirmation are fine as long as they reach the seller. Preparing a double spend for low amounts is too costly to bother.
For intermediate amounts (<$10000), there are services that verify that the transaction has been seen by enough nodes on the network to make the simple double-spend attack impossible (sending a fake transaction to the seller's node while broadcasting another to most of the network).
For very large amounts, you may want to protect yourself against the 51%-based double-spend attack which would insert a transaction in a block making yours invalid.

So <$100 transactions can be verified in a matter of seconds for free and <$10000 ones can be verified in seconds too by paying a service (don't know the rates, but given that it's not very difficult to do, even if it's not cheap today, it will be when needed).

>$10000 transactions today are very slow for individuals and small businesses (hours at best, days usually) so waiting for a couple of confirmations to make sure the coins are yours and 6 confirmations to use them is quite good. Big businesses can setup "green" addresses à la MtGox.

The only missing thing I could see here is adequate software for point of sales and users: software which doesn't put the same restrictions on every transaction and rate the trust you can have in them according to the risks involved.

Services like credit/debit cards will evolve to satisfy those people, and point-of-sale demands.

This is why I have always thought that Bitcoin would not ever replace other currency in its entirety. Society simply does not have the patience to wait around for their money to go through. We are a want it gotta have it now society.
 

The closest tool to what you are speaking of is blockchain.info's Unconfirmed Transactions list.
https://blockchain.info/unconfirmed-transactions

While it doesn't guarantee that mining pools will include your transaction, my guess would be that most pools are purposefully connected to blockchain.info, and would see your transactions as soon as blockchain.info does.

But, pools can choose which transactions to include, so just because it appears on blockchain.info's list doesn't mean it will make it into a block any time soon.  There are 2385 waiting transactions as I write this... and that's quite a lot.

no there isnt.

Is there a tool that lets you ask all the mining pools if they've received a transaction and if they think it is a legit transaction that will be included in a block? Because I think such a tool would be great and give peace of mind in accepting zero confirmation transactions because you'd know that all of the big pools have seen the transaction and will reject any double spend attempt after that, and so you could be pretty sure the tx will be included in a block without issues.

Don't worry, I'm sure the facts won't get in the way of whatever ponzi scheme you're planning on participating in next or people adopting the NextGreatThing designed by people who haven't a clue about what they're doing or the patience to learn.

The facts didn't stop people from trading Liquidcoin for BTC for a little while... until the facts caught up with them and made it vanish. 

I console myself with the fact that all the suckers and scammers are so slow to learn from their own mistakes that they just keep repeating them and its easier for the sane bystanders to avoid.

Not one based on the bitcoin algorithm.  Litecoin is already too fast most likely.

The Bitcoin algorithm is not convergent when the highest latency (including all block validation time) bisection of the hash rate becomes higher than the mean time between blocks. E.g. if a chain has a 3 minute average block time an it takes 3 minutes for some half of the miners to hear from and validate another half, then most of the time a new block will be found in each half before it's heard about the other half's blocks and the two will form longer and longer forks, which take longer and longer to reorg between. The result is a partition with the halves not able to agree on the history of transactions.

At current transactions levels (which are only a portion of the maximum allowed) Bitcoin is already seeing multi-minute propagation in some cases.

Litecoin's blocks could well be far enough apart to escape being doomed from this— escaping with just needing to wait for some more confirmations to cope with larger reorgs due to slower convergence (as the number of confirms you must wait for a given confidence goes up as you approach the latency bound); but it seems unlikely that the bitcoin algorithm could go much faster successfully.

It's a shame people don't even bother to learn from all the failed altcoins who have twiddled Bitcoin's parameters without understanding them or their reason for existence. They weren't set the way they were just to piss you off.

depends on the miners (pools software), altough if you need fast transactions, atleast 0.001 should be fine. 0.01 to be almost 100% sure that it gets included (if you can afford this), this depends on the other transactions in the network.

Except LTC can also take 90 minutes for a block too, it will just happen less often.

Maybe. The current reference software sorts transactions by fee per KB data size. Due to rounding that tiny increase may make no difference depending on your transaction size.  Paying less that the base fee won't help at all, very tiny fees are just treated the same as free transactions.  Historically even the base fee would have given you a substantial advantage. But the dice site is flooding the network with 0.0005 BTC fee transactions so free and 0.0005 transactions frequently get to wait.