Topic: bitcoin is failing in replacing fiat in physical shops - page 4. (Read 8586 times)

Worldcoin is also fast when cames to confirmations. Only 30 secs.

It has its downs sides, faster confirmations contribute into having bigger mining pools, since joining the bigger one is advantegious because you will have less blocks being created as orphans.



 

If thats the case, why don't any of the exchanges do this ? Not one single cryptocurrency exchange anywhere in the world uses the blockchain for any of its trades.

Even Coinbase doesn't do it if it can avoid it. Watch this video - you'll see demonstrated how incredibly easy it is to do account-to-account transactions as opposed to blockchain-based ones. The presenter even demonstrates sending bitcoin to **email addresses ** when the receiver doesn't have a blockchain address.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOoffwOJbY8

On this issue of having accounts to pay with instead of use BTC base money (i.e. cash), I already pointed out upthread that if I must have a zillion separate accounts, it is going to drive me crazy. I already have too many accounts on the internet to keep track of.

Instead a dominant set of providers would take over and we are right back to VISA, Mastercard, and Paypal again. Nothing gained. Why did we waste our fucking time inventing Bitcoin then.

So I entirely disagree that we need accounts for most things. We can build services that operate on the block chain without needing store funds in an account for those services. We can pay as we go, utilizing the block chain. This is the future.

We need less overhead in our lives, not more. Accounts are proliferated overhead and/or centralizing. We need decentralized freedom.

Also if accounts are holding our balances then they will naturally end up leveraged, i.e. fractional reserves. This is a repeating phenomenon throughout the history of man. We needed accounts when base money was gold, but we don't need them now. Our technology has improved. Money is no longer physical.

To backup our keys without giving a masterkey to a coinbase, we need to have physical copies of backups. Use a Print key or copy to removable memory card. Your software should tell you when to print/copy and store in your physical safe. If you find it more convenient and safe to have coinbase hold your masterkey, then you are giving up your anonymity because they will need to identify you if ever you lose your password.


As I explained upthread, a design is possible to bring each block chain confirmation down to 30 seconds or less and avoid the orphaned blocks.

Please don't be disingenuous to imply it is not possible. If you are merely stating that no altcoin has yet done such a holistic design, then I agree with you.

Regarding the speed of transactions. It's all about risk. you aren't going to wait 15 minutes to get 6 confirms for your coffee. Your house is another matter.

Also, I use Coino, and am quite invested in this coin. It is fully confirmed in 50 seconds. I routinely send funds or withdraw funds, and am able to spend or do whatever I want in less than one minute. There are always other altcoins if we need speed, But I don't think we ever need a faster BTC.


This will be the future. A payment processor which "okays" the payment instantly to the seller, allowing the buyer to leave with his item before the 6 confirms.

No. We will not. Please go back and read my previous posts about this. Confirmations and blockchain transactions have nothing to do with how Bitcoin sales will be conducted on a large scale. It doesn't matter what type of currency is in use - US Dollars, Euro's, Bitcoins, Litecoins, squirrels, pigs, barrels of oil, Storepoints - ALL these currencies get handled and WILL be handled by payment processors (as they do today).

Point of sale transactions are instantaneous - because we are not actually doing a bank transfer at the point of sale. Even if a coin appeared with 1 5-second confirmation time, it would still never be able to match the speed and functionality that Visa / Mastercard payment processors provide.

You'll still be paying with a 'card' it's just that the money will be coming from a cryptocurrency account managed by the appropriate payment processor. (This is already happening - look how the cryptocurrency exchanges work right now).

maybe you should change the coin ? if you want fast transactions

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-KoD7Eg-1A

This is an opportunity for a parody if someone can replace the word "body" with "bitcoin" in this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWz9VN40nCA

you might not see "blockchain transactions" but you will see some indication that the transaction is "ok" ie: the red light turn green, or a final receipt, after the  requisite number of confirmations is achieved.

Why not?  We see cash transaction there?

Whenever you don't pay with physical cash(paper money) you are paying with an account - either charging to a store account or a debit account or a credit card account.

The emergence of Cryptocurrencies on the scene will not change this. You will still be paying from an "account" - it will just be a cryptocurrency account.

We will not see blockchain transactions at the point of sale on any kind of scale (e.g. large stores and supermarkets) where there is a high turnover of sales.

nah, if I own a large stake in btc and have a chain of convenience stores I would always allow my customers to buy with btc as long as I know who my customer is.

I'm not insulting my customer over a $5 cup of coffee if I see the payment I wait for the confirmations, if the confirmation never arrrive when the customer returns we discuss it.   Everyone that has anything to do with btc SHOULD know that it is not perfect.

As soon as we're talking about customers with accounts, we're no longer in the same ballpark as the original post. I don't have an account at every place I buy coffee. I shouldn't need to. I don't have an account at the three supermarkets I use. If they want me to carry their loyalty card(s), that's up for negotiation. This stuff is clearly a layer on top of Bitcoin, and it clearly should be optional, only used where it adds value.

I think the idea is that often when you have an account, you don't have bitcoins any more. You have an IOU for bitcoins. There is a number of coins that you owe to the account, or it owes to you, and these can exist only in the account records, not in the block chain. The off-chain transactions are not subject to the same public scrutiny. For example, some people are concerned that MtGox have been indulging in fractional reserve banking. I don't think they have, but it's hard to prove without access to their internal accounts.

Personally I think FRB will inevitably happen sooner or later with bitcoin, for better or for worse.

You need to separate the "faster because of NFC" from the "faster because of payment processor". There's no reason why NFC can't be used for on-chain transactions. People are only using QR because it's currently more widely supported. Bitcoin isn't tied to QR codes.

The slowness is required as part of the "proof of work", which is at the core of Bitcoin's security design against double-spending. When the mining power increases, the protocol deliberately makes mining harder so it doesn't get any faster.

Other crypto-currencies use other times than 10 minutes. In practice using 5 minutes or even 1 minute doesn't help as much as you'd expect, because it's still too long to wait in retail. It has a downside in that it leads to more resources wasted on discarded blocks.

"bitcoin is failing in replacing fiat in physical shops"

it never was mention to do replace anything but it will soon or later change the world

so no one  has ever went to those self serve refreshment or icecream machines and took a little extra while no one is looking, or made sure it was nearly overflowing to maximise their purchase of something under £$2

Nonsense. Seller has no way of knowing that you didn't send a double-spend within the past few seconds, because your spends don't instantly go into the block chain. Learn what 0-confirmations means.


With the 50% unemployment coming to the western world in several years, I can see them attempting a double-spend for a bag of groceries if they have up to 10 minutes to disappear from the store.

If caught an attempted defense might be, "someone must have hacked my password, I didn't send that double-spend".


A fraudster could send the $1000s in BTC to himself, some seconds before issuing the second Tx. Most likely both transactions would be rejected once the duplicates propagate over the network. Or one of the transactions might make it into the next block solution before the other propagated.

You do not understand what transaction malleability is.  If I am taking an in person transaction sent to my own Bitcoin address and I see it unconfirmed, and it is for some reason altered, I still get the Bitcoins.  They just have a different transaction ID but they end up in my wallet anyhow.  

PS - I took an in person Bitcoin transaction today, along with doing several purchases with Bitcoin and selling online items out of my store.   

The premise that people would attempt to double-spend real world micro transactions (e.g. get free coffee or even a cart of groceries) is absurd.

For larger transactions, such as buying gold bullion or a Lamborghini, waiting for 6 confirmations is reasonable. Besides, I doubt you could register a car with the DMV in the time it takes to do 6 confirms.

I do a lot of localbitcoins selling directly from my Android wallet, and the buyer has always been happy to hand over thousands of USD and walk away once they see evidence of the Tx broadcast.

How odd. I just bought three Sapphire cards from a vendor using Bitcoin. He showed me his QR, I put in the price, hit send, and we both agreed that it would be highly unlikely that I would be able to reverse the blockchain and double-spend the transaction.

Whatever.

C

Even a $1,000 Amazon gift card was instantly credited to my wife's account.  She used it at Amazon before her payment to BitPay received even its first confirmation.  

But this just shows that zero-confirmations are actually very secure^* provided that the transaction has been accepted by many nodes in the network and that no double spends have been detected.  Double spending is very difficult and one can only succeed with a probability proportionate to how much global hash power one controls [https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.5151306].  

As I calculated above [https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.5151972], to succeed at double spending 6 - 12% of the time, one would need to purchase $24,000,000 of mining equipment [and risk having this forfieted by law enforcement if you got caught].  This is not a concern.  


^*The malleabily problem has revealed an edge-case that makes a small subset of zero-confirm transactions less reliable, namely unconfirmed transactions that contain as inputs the change outputs of other unconfirmed transactions while the network is under malleability attack.  This is the "malleability bug" that people are worried about--it is a real concern.  While the core developers work to eliminate malleability entirely, the work-around now being rolled out is to prohibit wallets from creating transactions from unconfirmed change.  

buying from gyft uses 0 confirmation time? How can they afford that risk? Or does it depend on the purchase amount?

EDIT: I just read another thread and found this post "I know bitpay already does instant transactions with merchants (I'm sure there's a limit on the transaction value) and if double spending were to occur they cover the cost so merchants have nothing to worry about.  I'm not 100% sure but I believe coinbase has started offering the same thing.  They simply account for occasional losses in their business model. "

Well that is still not good enough in my book as you have to rely to a thrid party to make zero confirmations with no risk. That is like increasing the centralization of bitcoin.

I say not good enough because their are going to be alternate crypto-currencies that won't require this to have near instant transactions.