With confirmations taking minutes instead of milliseconds as typical credit card transactions do, I don't see bitcoin being a viable alternative for vending machines, convenience stores, etc.
How would it be possible to create a new coin, tied to bitcoin (but at a fraction of the value) that is updated more regularly. Instead of 10 blocks an hour they go for 10 blocks a minute? Obviously the difficulty would have to be way down. At least this way a merchant could possibly get 2 or 3 confirmations before releasing any product to a consumer.
Any ideas?
How would it be possible to create a new coin, tied to bitcoin (but at a fraction of the value) that is updated more regularly. Instead of 10 blocks an hour they go for 10 blocks a minute? Obviously the difficulty would have to be way down. At least this way a merchant could possibly get 2 or 3 confirmations before releasing any product to a consumer.
Any ideas?
The shorter the average interval for signing blocks, the greater the chance of fragmentation of the block chain. Simply put, it could (and probably does) take quite a bit longer than 6 seconds for a solved block to propogate around the network to all miners. In the meantime, other miners would have gone on to add other blocks to the chain. The block chain would be in a constant state of fragmentation. Nobody would have any confidence that a verified transaction really was verified; even if you wanted for 10 verifications (1 minute), the chance of the block eventually being invalidated because some other chain won out would be pretty high.