Topic: Fast payment and double spending alerts (Read 1153 times)
It would make things much better with this double spending alert.
But I haven't got anyone from the Bitcoin development team to respond to this yet.
One person reported (in another thread) that the main concern with this double spending alert might not be reported by a compromised pool.
I don't see this as an ultimate threat, such pool would get into scrutiny anyway.
The main point is that the double spending alert would make it quite less urgent to get 6 confirmations in bitcoin.
Just getting an alert would flag the merchant to wait for this 6 confirmations, if none, things are fine.
It would make about irrelevant the case of Litecoin or any other alt coin < 10 minutes per block.
And the benefits of 10 minutes is it reduces the possible orphans branch quite much. I'm not sure if anyone has done some research on how much orphan blocks are happening in these quick cryptos with less than 2 minutes of block time, but I'm sure there are quite more.
Can any in the bitcoin development team tell us? I've sent an email to Gavin Andresen directly, no answer. I'm sure he gets a lot of emails so, I can understand it got flooded.
Where can I ask this question to get an answer? : When/if this double spending alert will be implemented?
We should be at least match the existing technologies. A contactless credit card is less than 3 seconds. Chip and Pin about 4-8 seconds.
Any retailer considering Bitcoin, is not going to want to hear it takes 15 seconds for a face to face small item transaction.
That said, it is not unreasonable to have different levels of confidence. Maybe a traffic light system. Red, amber, green, with a confidence % level set by the retailer. Process the order when amber. Aim to not let the customer leave until green.
Any retailer considering Bitcoin, is not going to want to hear it takes 15 seconds for a face to face small item transaction.
That said, it is not unreasonable to have different levels of confidence. Maybe a traffic light system. Red, amber, green, with a confidence % level set by the retailer. Process the order when amber. Aim to not let the customer leave until green.
I think your on to something... if the transaction times could be dropped down to 15 seconds you would be within the same realm as a debit card transaction. Something like this would allow crypto to compete as a payment option, for example, customers standing in line at a grocery stores. As far as transaction speeds are concerned anyway.
I have more technical questions that goes about what I originally posted on reddit:
http://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/1sezuw/what_are_the_issues_with_faster_block_generations/
Basically, when will this change in the Bitcoin client change happens that is mention in this article: (See section 5.3):
http://eprint.iacr.org/2012/248.pdf
Do you see a need for a solution to waiting 10 minutes as too long? It sounds like, with what is depicted in section 5.3, that once this implementation is done, just waiting for 15 seconds for receiving a payment without any conflict would be sufficient to be confident, isn't it?
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