Topic: BITCOIN IS TOO SLOW TO EVER SUCCEED AS ONLINE CURRENCY (Read 2804 times)

Just wait things will get better....

I agree its not just swipe and go but just like anything the speed will increase, dial up vs high speed Internet. and no you have not done your home work it is more like four to fifteen minutes. mostly about 8 min for confirmation.

also paypal is the most frustrating platform ever!!!! especially for merchants like me. good god all mighty I hate paypal they are the worst to work with and you have limits on how much you can withdraw from your account per month. its a horrible system.

and credit card ..... relay!?!? you like racking up debt and paying an 8-20% fee on everything you purchase!??? and paying for the card in the first place?? AND the sales tax to top it off. pay the minimum every month and you could end up pay 2x the price of that flat screen TV.  also someone could still your credit card WAY easier than your blockchain and passkey.

I can see that they do have some benefits but they have more disadvantages than advantages

+100.

There is a trick that you can convert btc to ltc and then use the ltd to trade -> they move much faster.

This is what litecoin is for of course...

Ideas:

- establish a standard guide for how many confirmations to wait for according to the size of transactions: What do you advise?

- Mt.Gox should lower number of transactions on a sliding scale for smaller transactions. Waiting for 6 gives newcomers the idea that it's always got to be this way

- publicise the confirmation speed. 10mins = 1 confirmation, 3=30mins, 6=1hr (generally)

- advise the confirmation speed in tooltips on clients such as electrum

- notification of confirmation by email or audio like on blockchain.info

That's not really true; perhaps if the price had been oscillating wildly I'd agree with you - what we've had is sustained upward movement with the occasional flash crash. Merchants for one are quite happy to accept payments in Bitcoins while the price is going up (part of the reason I think bitcoinstore has been selling at a discount).
Customers might be wary about spending Bitcoins if they think the price is skyrocketing, but in practice that doesn't really seem to be the case. Especially since many of these people bought or mined their Bitcoins when the price was so low - I've had more orders since the price started going up than in the previous 7 months.
That the price is going up so steeply is ultimately a good thing for Bitcoin - by comparison with gold and silver, the higher Bitcoin's market cap is, the more stable the price should be. Silver is much more volatile than gold, because the market is so much smaller - both are highly stable by comparison with Bitcoin.

If Bitcoin makes it huge, you're going to see a huge shift in culture.

People will not only be encouraged to save, save, save, but when they do make purchases, they'll have to be patient for the funds to go through.

That will pretty much quash the live fast, die young, get fat, impulse-buy mentality America has and likes to push on the nations it conquers.  I'm all for that.

lol

Great thread, some interesting points, some complete BS and a special thanks to the more level headed people who bought in the exact technical issues of "instant" transactions.

No doubt services or methods to make this possible or at least within a much shorter time span are needed for general adoptance of BTC in everyday online spending.

Good point about values, until Bitcoin finds its stable value, people cannot really trade. It's more than "displaying the BTC price". The cost/price of deals would be changing daily and making business via BTC impossible. You could pay for "deal A" in the morning and that cost to you could of doubled by the evening. You could be losing, gaining double in a day.

No merchants or buyers can trade like that.

As to creating a zero transaction service, I would genuinely be interested in working with anyone keen to make that happen.

I love Bitcoin. I even wear Bitcoin t-shirts just to help publicize it and will soon implement BTC as a method of payment on some sites I develop. But there have been some valid points raised in this thread, and I hope the developers will take note and adjust.

Most of the "criticism" in this thread comes from others who also want to see Bitcoin succeed, and their observations were made from a desire to help and improve. It shouldn't be taken as a slight to the developers or to the Bitcoin system. Bitcoin rocks.

As long as it's done within an hour or, who cares? I stick to Paypal mostly due to ordering from ebay. >_>

Ok, I already completed this paper.

It basically demonstrates both theoretically and empirically that it was possible and CHEAP for them (no mining at all) to make double-spends to a faked vendor (themselves of course). They just made sure the attacker's peer connected to the vendors peer while they maintained some (FEW) helpers at some points of the network.

Those helpers had a direct connection with the attacker daemon so that they could receive the order "to inject" the BAD transaction on the network when A needed it, that is just a few moments before or after A fakes the GOOD transaction to the vendor daemon.

Interesting facts they proved:
1- Some blocks can take up to 40 minutes to form.
2- Even after 2 seconds of head start of the GOOD tr. vs the BAD one, just 2 helpers used to guarantee the success of the attack most of the time so that the bad transaction is confirmed in the next block and the merchant is scammed (with no company or individual to sue).
And after 1 second the success is sure with JUST 2 helpers!!
Not really that expensive to have two or three modified bitcoind arround, a botnet of a few tenths of processes is easy and cheap to deploy.

3- Bitcoiners suggestion to use a "listening period" is NOT a definitive solution and can be defied by increasing the number of helpers (but still under 10 in most tests).

4- Bitcoiner's suggestion to use observers is only useful while increasing merchant bitcoin deployment costs setup, while a easier solution exists...

The problem here is simple...
Why does bitcoin peers SILENTLY drop double-spending transactions when they detect them?
It is silly they should just REPORT the invalid transactions to their peers (while reject them both in this block)

This is what the paper suggest as the solution just use an alert message (that the protocol already defined) to notify fraudulent transactions.

In this way a merchant, with an typical standard setup and no more hassles, can rely on bitcoin to make "instant" payments:
- In a shop, just make the receipt printer wait 6-12 seconds (configurable by the vendor with a default value considered "safe enough") so that any double spending attack is detected and notified in that time OR print a warning otherwise... so that the merchant can make the client wait for the police...

I prefer this solution to the one I was proposing and that was much more complex.

Anybody knows if these "double-spending report alerts" are implemented TODAY in the protocol?

(If that is the case I would have to admit that bitcoin does INDEED support "instant" transactions securely enough,
if not, why is this not implemented already?
what is the problem for such a small change with so obvious returns to be rejected?
still to much self-complacency?)


AND THANKS to VeeMiner FOR POINTING me to this paper!!!



 

while you say that BTC is slow someone is doing a transaction now at $260... Very fast REALLY?

this

PayPal is faster that Bitcoin? You must be high.
Bitcoins are one reason I no longer need to use ShitPal as much. For this I am grateful.

This would still require that you relay a transaction to a vendor, while getting a similar transaction to a miner. Without the Vendor or the miner seeing the double transaction before the other. That's hard and expensive to accomplish.

This paper is from mid 2012, my understanding is that this is practically fixed. (Not 100% sure though)

And still, with Bitcoin you have 1 Hour until a transaction is considered absolutely irreversibly.

With other Systems like CreditCards you have up to 180 Days until irreversibly.
It really would be the same as saying 180 days for charegbacks makes CreditCards to slow.

You are putting it as if every Bitcoiner would always try to make a double spend. All this attacks make no economical sense for low - mid value goods.

And no one would accept your credit card when you buy something like a house.

Only Cash is saver for fast payments than Bitcoin.

Sorry if I sound offensive, but I really don't get the issue.

Then this paper should be wrong:
http://people.scs.carleton.ca/~clark/biblio/bitcoin/Karame%202012.pdf

"In this paper, we analyze the security of using
Bitcoin for fast payments, where the time between
the exchange of currency and goods is ... seconds).

We focus on doublespending attacks on fast payments and demonstrate
that these attacks can be mounted at low cost on
currently deployed versions of Bitcoin.

We further show that the measures recommended by Bitcoin developers for the use of Bitcoin in fast transactions are
not always effective in resisting double-spending; we
show that if those recommendations are integrated
in future Bitcoin implementations, double-spending
attacks on Bitcoin will still be possible.

Finally, we leverage on our findings and propose a lightweight
countermeasure that enables the detection of doublespending attacks in fast transactions."

I haven't read it all yet, I am curious about the "lightweight countermeasure" they purpose...

But this proves that the one saying "this is slow" had a point!

So what do you reply now?

The problem is, that Bitcoin is build about that confirmations in Blocks. It's necessary to ensure that Bitcoin is resilient to attacks.

Therefore the Mining ensures that an attacker would nee more than 50% of all Processing Power mining on the "good" site to have a long term success.

If you want faster confirmations, the Bandwidth requirements for the network increase to not find a lot of orphan blocks.

If you want instant confirmations and still no central authority you would basically need unlimited bandwidth.

I don't understand what the problem with 0 confirmations is. Do you have any Idea how hard it is to double spend a transaction.

The only really Dangerous attack requires the participation of a miner with a reasonable % of the networks hashing power and even than success is improbable.

So the costs of a successful double spend would require Mining Equipment worth Millions of $ by now.

Is this dangerous for day to day transactions?

Again,

what's wrong with upgrading bitcoin support instantly confirmed decentralized payment in addition to the ones it already supports?

Can anybody explain what problems do they see in that?

The Price will stabilize at some point (it can't go up like this for ever).

Until then. There are payment providers, that give you the equivalent in €,$ etc. at the moment of the purchase and do all calculations for you. Using one of those you can accept BTC and still price in Fiat.