Topic: BITCOIN IS TOO SLOW TO EVER SUCCEED AS ONLINE CURRENCY - page 2. (Read 2804 times)

What i see as a problem for merchant trying to use bitcoin is pricing. how can you realistically price your merchandise when the Value of BTC changes drasticly daily? currently it seems that all it is good for  is speculators and miners. To be usable a currancy needs a relatively stable value.

Bitcoin wasn't designed for either microtransactions, or for speed, in it's original protocol. However, bitcoin is excellent for anything that is willing to wait at least a block or 10 minutes.

For example:
1. pay your rent, your bills. electricity, water, phone, internet, cable TV, gas, etc.
2. buy something downloadable content. you get emailed the link in 10 minutes.
3. anything you'd normally write a check for.
4. buy credits or load for certain services, like cell phone air time or online video games (MMORPG)
5. pay for toll (those things that beep in your car for access to toll roads or high speed highways)
6. pay your hotel bill, your hospital bill. You are staying for longer than 10 or 20 minutes.
7. dine in inside a fancy restaurant. you eat. you pay. you finish eating. you can leave. this can even work for fast food.
8. for any service that requires you to come back for it later: alter clothes, change the oil in your car, car wash, repair your computer or your gadget.
9. to pay for jail breaking your iphone, or unlocking your cell phone, or rooting your android device (if you don't know how to do this yourself.)
10. buying anything that will get shipped the next day, like hardware, barbells, toys, sports equipment.

And if you're into gambling, many bitcoin dice games are near instant.

For all those purposes above, bitcoin can be used. Merchants just need an internet connection to confirm your payment. They all have that anyway.

So you are also waiting 180 Days on a Credit Card transaction until it's "confirmed" and can't be reversed anymore?

Confirmations only mean there is no possibility of fraud anymore.

A 0 confirmation transaction is still by the several orders of magnitude saver than a Credit Card or PayPal transaction.

Like already said a 100 Times. Waiting for confirmation makes onnly sense for High Value Goods and for high turnover trading.

U r not an exception, btw. In 1st and 2nd use cases Bitcoin sucks coz it's irreversible. U can't charge back bitcoins. If u r a seller it's good for u, but if u r a buyer this definitely sucks.

I am sorry, but I think everybody here is wrong in a way or the other, even bitcoinologist.

It all depends on the Use Case...

1) Online monetary transactions: Bitcoin RULES!
Bitcoin is faster than anything else that existed BEFORE (eg. paypal). I think anybody already agrees in that...
...BUT "faster" doesn't mean "instantaneous", bitcoinologist is right about that, instantaneous is "SECONDS" NOT "MINUTES". Here many bitcoiners blinded by lack of auto-critic or excess of love for the tool/currency are changing the meaning of "instantaneous" to avoid admitting that there is room for improvement in that area.


2) Online goods/services transactions: Bitcoin RULES!
Here is where I think bitcoinologist is wrong. Most, if not all, web services and web shops are don't deliver instantaneously. It is perfectly fine taking 10 minutes or an 1 hour to receive an email for a new DNS service that will have to propagate anyway, plane tickets, train tickets, goods that are going to be delivered later in the day, etc.
When the costumer clicks "buy", you just check the transaction when through and reply "Congratulations! your purchase was successful!"... which DOESN'T mean that you are NOT checking its confirmations on the background and can revert or suspend the goods or service delivery if anything wrong is detected 1 hour later.


3) "In person" transactions: Bitcoin is inconvenient most of the time.
Merchants of small goods/services cannot wait 10 minutes for 1 confirmation or 6h for a the proposed confirmations. Bitcoiners replies to this are unsatisfactory and a symptom of too much self-complacency on bitcoin and lack of auto-critic:

 - They say the merchant should risk the money cause it's unlikely that it will be lost. But again, the merchant could disagree, even if it does that with VISA. Cause in VISA at least both the buyer AND the VISA company are identified and the merchant could sue someone, while in bitcoin the money is lost and the buyer might not be identified most of the time. Imagine Carrefour or Walmart, for instance, they probably would never accept bitcoins due to fear of some hacker group coordinating an attack on their shops attacking it to steal lots of goods on a prepared coordinated fashion.

 - Others say that they could use a service provider, but that violates the philosophy that you can can be (if you prefer) your own service provider on all matters.

The facts remains that:

1- Bitcoin mining is what makes bitcoin so useful and successful BUT...

2- But at the same time, making all transactions speed depend on mining speed does not sound right.

3- Bitcoin potential success means scalability problems: most clients mobile phones already and soon PCs wont be able to keep up with the block chain size and growth traffic, so they will have to trust external providers... just like the ripple protocol consensus does.


My proposal, that none has taken a minute to tell me what they see wrong about it is:

Why doesn't bitcoin aim for a decentralized instant (meaning seconds) transactions like this?

A) At some point, a second blockchain is created, it can be linked hashed to a certain block. This new block chain does have very little to zero mining reward. Lets call it "the fast block chain or FTB".

B) The original block chain or OTB is untouched, it works just as it does now, maybe with smaller rewards to allocate the ones in the faster block chain.

C) Transactions can refer to outputs on both block chains.

D) The FTB could work like the OTB but using a mining cycle of 3 seconds instead of 10 minutes. Or, without mining, it could use a 3 seconds consensus algorithm just like in ripple to close a block.

E) Transaction fees on the FTB will be higher on the FTB than on the OTB (but don't need to be expensive) to reward FTB miners/servers.

F) Transaction load on the OTB will decrease, making small transactions that don't pay fees faster or even able to get through at all. (Imagine what would happen on an single unimproved bitcoin chain) to tiny transactions when handling thousands of tps, many won't get through for many, many blocks. Others may never get through cause there is always another more rewarding, even if its days/weeks/years younger.


And I don't buy the go to ripple then... Ripple weak spot for me is their lack of mining. One company created all the XRPs? I don't trust that. Mining is better than that, the problem is that what is good for mining may not be so good for "instantaneous decentralized transaction confirmation".

This is ludicrous.  I had to wait 2-3 days for a wire transfer to clear.  I have to wait 2-3 days for my direct deposit paycheck to clear.  Same with credit cards.  Gas I bought 2 days ago is still "pending" at the hold rate.  That's a 100USD hold for a 40USD tank of gas.

True true - but transferring via BitInstant can be sometimes very frustratingly slow...   

You get get you transaction shown in the matter of seconds in your client.

The confirmations only mean that the transaction is now irreversible!

Do you know how long it takes until a PayPal or CreditCard transaction is irreversible? Up to 180 days!

So I would say Bitcoin is incredibly fast.

paypal is much slower than bitcoin....much slower

It's a way back to fiat and fractional reserve. Don't count me in.

i have an idea to speed up the transaction - make it happens instantly.

For daily usage, like buying a coffee...
I guess some big player can develop some sort of payment gateway that supports real world currency (or faster cryptocurrency) and bitcoin at the same time. The idea is, you will need equal value of faster currency in your account in order to spend your bitcoin.

1. The gateway would pay for the coffee on your behalf instantly (to the merchant account) given that you have enough 'reserve' in your account.
2. the gateway would hold your 'reserve' (faster) currency until the bitcoin transaction is confirmed.  
3. gateway then releases the reserve as soon as your bitcoin transaction is confirmed.

for larger transaction, i believe that the wait is barable?

Is typing in caps supposed to lend credibility to your assertion?
Because you have a quite an uphill climb in arguing that bitcoin can't succeed, even as it succeeds beyond our wildest dreams.

No. 10 min between blocks is by design.

can it become faster?

Confirmation time can only really be an issue when you spend money on the high street - online retailers are happy to wait 1 hour before they ship something to you. Even on the high street I can't see it being a problem either, consider examples like this:

If you buy a takeaway coffee for 10mBTC, chances are that most cafes will be happy to let you leave with a 0-confirmation sale - the probability of fraud is very low, and the impact of the fraud is only the price of a cup of coffee.
At the other end of the scale, if you're buying a car from a dealer for 150BTC, you will have already filled in a load of forms with your name and address, and probably shown ID, so the dealer will also probably be happy seeing you leave with zero confirmations.

Other things to point out - you could easily buy a car with a credit card, then call up your bank and say that you didn't make that purchase, and they'll cancel the transaction. You'll probably go to jail, but why wouldn't you also go to jail if you did the equivalent with Bitcoin?
We could also just use small-denomination private keys as hard currency (physical Bitcoins) for buying small things like coffee.

I don't mind it being a bit slow at all.

I suggest reading this article:

http://people.scs.carleton.ca/~clark/biblio/bitcoin/Karame%202012.pdf

a frontend like ripple solves this easily, no?

It's a side effect of extensive growth of miners population. It can't last forever.

A thousand times this.


And this. How's those confirmation times looking now?

Also, wikileaks has had great success using Paypal and credit cards.