Topic: Confirmation Time - page 4. (Read 3750 times)

You can think whatever you like, but the fact remains that credit card transactions remain reversible for many months since a customer can refuse the charges and, depending on the contract that the merchant has with the credit card processor, the merchant can lose those funds.

Bitcoins become completely irreversible after a few confirmations and are generally irreversible after the first confirmation.

The link you provided is meaningless.  At the top of that page it even says:

I think you are wrong and my comparison is perfect. Because your words contradict to this.

Your comparison is flawed.

If you try to pay with bitcoins, and you don't have enough unspent outputs to use as inputs, you aren't able to even create a transaction.  Any attempt to create a transaction with fake inputs would be rejected by every peer and would never be seen by the merchant at all.

Therefore, bitcoin is again faster since it stops "insufficient funds" transactions before they are ever sent whereas it takes a few seconds for the credit card processor to determine if your card has enough funds.

In my country if you try to pay with a card that doesn't have enough money then the payment is not accepted. Hence I would compare it to 1 confirmation.

Yeah that's the dilemma but hopefully that problem will be solved once there are decentralized exchanges.

Well you only require 2 confirmations to avoid double spending. So you don't really need 6 confirmations all the time.

Yep so people end up leaving their coins on the exchange and then the exchange gets hacked and their coins are gone...

It has been discussed several times and nothing can be done about this. Some exchanges require 3-6 confirmations before the btc appears in your wallet and that can take up-to an hour sometimes and say you saw a coin which was going cheap and you wanted to grab it, it will be gone by the time your deposit gets confirmed.

Isnt that like a transaction beeing checked for validity and would thus be comparable with a received but unconfirmed BTC transaction? At least thats my understand of CC payments.

I have had to wait for over an hour for one bitcoin confirmation in the past. There is a thread discussing the fact the network seems stressed by big blocks at present. That might be why.

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/the-network-seems-stressed-and-behind-right-now-972003

Credit cards take 5 sec for their first confirmation.

Yes this is a problem, it would be a lot better if that happened faster. I hope it will be solved in the near future.

Not always. E.g. digital items are not covered. If you buy something with a stolen CC on steam you might get your account suspended, but steam will never see the money even though you got the digital items (e.g. CS:GO weapon skin).


Yes, but not for the shop owner. They just take the risk because the loss due to stolen CC is lower than the loss of people unable to pay because they have no cash with them. Sometimes the shop can have the CC company pay and they also just take the loss, because its covered by their fees. Essentially Credit Cards make coffee more expensive for everyone even for those that pay with cash, because the shop owner does a mixed calculation on the price. Thus all the fees and losses are paid by all customers. With BTC the customer would have to pay the fee and thus cash payment would essentially be cheaper because it works without a fee.


The good things with BTC transactions is that you can counter scam (double spend) attempts. A CC is always legit whether its used by the owner or a scammer. There is nothing you can do about it, you cant detect a stolen CC until its reported as such. Most of the time its not even the physical card thats stolen, but just the information on it.


Again, there is always a risk involved when accepting any form of payment. Someone that owns a shop is aware of that and its reflected in the price. IMHO wide acceptance of bitcoin would lower the potential to scam and thus lower prices (or result in higher profits)

it was an exchange to exchange transaction so not sure if they included a TX fee or not.

There are few threads about the network being behind with transactions. There are constantly over 2k unconfirmed transactions to be processed. It will take some time to clear the back log. Did you add enough fee to the transaction?

Thanks - you've done a great job of answering.

The only thing with the above is whilst credit cards may take that long to confirm I think the CC companies guarantee the transaction don't they? So in effect when you're paying for your coffee, as far as you're concerned the transaction is immediate. Where as if paying with BTC the company selling the coffee would have to bear the cost of an unconfirmed transaction going bad (just an example with the coffee of course).

Like they'd see the transaction quite quickly but it might not do a single confirmation for sometime after.

Thanks!

That can happen yes. Sometimes there is no block found for 30 minutes, sometimes your fee is to low and/or the priority of the transaction is not high enough.


No. Creditcards take 6-12 months for their first confirmation, I dont see anyone complaining about that or any customers camping 6 months because they paid for a coffee with a CC.


No, difficulty adjusts to keep the average time to find a block at 10 minutes while computation power rises.


Im not sure how to answer that question, but I dont think you have understood how bitcoin works. If you have more questions feel free to ask.

Sorry if this has been asked before, i did search.

So I've sent some BTC to an address over 30mins ago and still not even 1 confirmation. Firstly wouldn't this be an issue for BTC to ever be mainstream if you can't pay for things immediately in shops etc?

Also I presume the confirmation time will take longer the bigger the difficulty?

I think i've understood how it works correctly?