Topic: Confirmation Time (Read 1106 times)

Green wallet address solve this problem!

How far are we away from being able to go into a shop choose an item to purchase and pay for it with bitcoin
and be able to leave the outlet in the same amount of time it takes me to do a credit card transaction.

LOL this started as a thread about long confirmation time, and is now a thread about credit card fraud. Enough already!

well depending on how your service operates (online vs in person), not accepting credit cards can GREATLY decrease the amount of potential customers you get. Also VERY VERY few people use bitcoins, so unless your service somehow specifically targets that market it might not mean much to the average person.

Overall quite a small % of payments are fraudulently charged back. The credit card did not get near 100% penetration in everyday commerce by being completely overwhelmed by fraud...

Oh my, it seems like I've started a gigantic discussion
Anyway, I'm a penny dust gatherer, and that 0.15BTC is actually my entire balance So I actually can't afford a transaction fee

The chargeback process taking a long time for credit cards just means there is a longer window of uncertainty for the merchant.

If double spending is so easy to do, do you have any examples of people double spending against you? If I understand correctly, it does not matter whether you include a fee or not, if the coins in the transaction are already in another transaction then the transaction is not accepted by nodes. It does not take long for a transaction to propagate through the network, so to do a double spend you have to time the sending of the two transactions very closely.

^ I didn't know this, a bit worried now because I had plans to accept credit cards for a service of mine 

BTCitcoin FTW

There are genuine frauds in both credit card world and bitcoin world. I'd say the number of frauds is significantly less in credit card world percentage-wise. Though bitcoin world is increasingly getting better in this area. "no chargeback" isn't really better, you are just deciding which party to screw. In creditcard world, the rules screw the merchant, but the merchant is able to better absorb the cost by raising the price, AFAIK it's very rare for a merchant to go bankrupt by having legitimate chargebacks. In the bitcoin world, the rules screw the buyer (unless some form of escrow is used), and it's pretty easy for a single person to go bankrupt by being a victim of a fraud/hack, as we have seen many times here. This is why silkroad, bitmit etc all recommend/require escrow for their transactions.

Again, my point is physical shop transactions with Bitcoin CAN NOT become popular in its current form, without 3rd party involvement, it's simply illogical. This is why after 4 years, physical shop adoption is nearly non-existent while online Bitcoin use has exploded. To have physical shop adoption, there must be a 3rd party service that can guarantee valid instant transaction in Bitcoin. I believe coinbase would be a good candidate for this, since it already host user wallets and handle payment processing.

Well no none of that is true.  All reference nodes will reject double spends so it requires a little more effort than just "sending again with a fee".  However for the sake of argument lets say your right it is trivially easy to perform a double spend AND it is virtually impossible to perform a chargeback ($28B would say otherwise), what happens when the credit card is genuinely used fraudulently?  Ooops.  An authorization is just that.  It is a request for funds.  A request which can after the fact be denied for a variety of reasons.  Nothing is "confirmed" until the tx clears in 180 days.

The OP had a bloated, low value transaction and paid no fee.  Comparing that to a reversible credit card transaction costing 3% or more isn't exactly accurate would you say.

In this case the value of the OP transaction was ~$3.90.  At online rates of 2.75% + $0.30 that is something like $0.40 in fee or over 10% of purchase price.  If the user included a 10% fee I am sure it would have been included in the next block.  If the user even included a 1% fee it is highly likely it would have been included in the next block.

No, there's a huge difference. With credit card, the shop can be pretty sure that most of the people isn't going to fraudulently chargeback, the chargeback process takes a lot of time and effort to go through with. Also once you are flagged as a chargeback abuser, you can no longer successfully chargeback.

But double spend, is trivial to do, it's simple as sending two transactions, one with a fee, the other without. There's no time or effort involved, also you can do double spends as much as you want, with no one stopping you.

Dubious distinction.   Fraud is fraud that is all that matters to the merchant.  I mean it is like saying sky diving in the desert without a parachute is safe because you can't die from drowning.

It is trivial to wrongfully charge back a purchase made with a credit card, especially one made online.   So called "friendly fraud" costs retailers about $28B annually in fraud losses. 

http://www.friendlyfraudprevent.com/FriendlyFraud.aspx


Still lets pretend friendly fraud was impossible, a credit card authorization is just that an authorization and if not made by an authorized user the authorization is worthless.  If it isn't Mr. Smith using Mr. Smiths credit card to buy that Plasma TV then you are going to get a genuine chargeback.

The comparison is correct.
unconfirmed bitcoin transaction = credit card authorization.  If the customer is legit you have nothing to worry about. If they aren't you could be losing money.

The difference is that you can't double spend your credit card, so the promise to pay is as good as money in hand, unless the customer go through the chargeback process with evidence and take on legal liability (the shop can sue the customer in small claims court if the customer is committing fraud). This is the reason why Bitcoin in its current form can never become popular in instant physical shop transactions, a 3rd party will have to be used, for example bitpay/coinbase(if they offered such service), to guarantee that a 0 confirmation transaction would not be a double spend.

You are missing the fact that when you swipe your credit card, the shop does not immediately receive the money from you.  All they receive is a promise to pay.  The shop then has to wait for the payment processor to settle the balance (perhaps at the end of the day?) before any money is transferred into their bank account.  Even then they have to hope that you don't dispute the charges, forcing the payment processor to take the money back out of their account.

With bitcoin, they can see the promise to pay within seconds (just like with a credit card).  Instead of having to wait until the end of the day to have the promise to pay fulfilled, they can know that the money is irreversibly theirs as soon as the transaction is in a few blocks.  (generally within an hour if a proper transaction fee is paid).  It's likely that miners will eventually look ahead at chains of unconfirmed transaction to determine priority. This will allow a shop to pay a fee on behalf of their customers to ensure that the transactions are quickly included in a block.

Obviously, 7h is pretty long, as an absolute value. When putting it into context and comparing with other transactions, it's perfectly normal.

Also, you don't necessarily need a confirmation to be sure a transaction has gone through. Even non-confirmed transactions are pretty difficult to double-spend, so it all comes down to what kind of stuff you're buying. Few people will be bothered trying to double-spend a few dollars worth of bitcoins, and with larger values confirmation time will be a lot quicker anyway.

And let's not forget that putting a 0.0005 btc fee would probably get his/hers transaction into the next block.

I don't understand what you mean 7 hours is not long.
Is there a way that I can confirm coins have been received within say
the amount of time it takes me to swipe my credit card is a shop.
Am I missing something?

This transaction has 5 inputs, making it ~3x larger then the average one. Also, all those inputs are relatively new coins, so that would prolong confirmation time even further. I'd say considering all that, 7h is not long at all.

Herp derp
I sent a 0.15BTC transfer from a blockchain.info wallet to an Instawallet wallet, and included no transaction fee. The input was one single transaction, and so was the output. It took 7 hours and 9 minutes to confirm though

TX ID: 25763e273f4edcf15efe822110632cee07ea2c41cd7813616769d1b93c2f6ce7