Topic: Faster bitcoin transaction times - page 4. (Read 12419 times)

In reality what may happen is that payment channels will be used as a layer on top of Bitcoin. Here is Jeff Garzik talking about payment channels:

CoinSummit London 2014 - Will Bitcoin Last the Distance Beyond the 51% Challenge? -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2q9pItnO0U&t=17m52s

That sounds like a good solution. It will prevent the block chain from becoming bloated and it will allow very fast (I guess) transaction times and a huge number of transactions per second. Would be excellent even for micropayments.

Quickly may not fast enough if it takes several weeks to implement as the wiki page said. And the miners must make changes so they can process larger blocks, which too may take a while for them to implement.

I suggest reading this wiki page:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability

The 7 txps limit is arbitrary, not a design choice, and can be increased quickly if necessary.
Miners won't suffer from this - they only have to confirm each transaction once per pool.

With faster transaction times the capacity for the number of transactions would increase without needing to change the block size. What would happen today if there would be a huge spike in number of bitcoin transactions? I assume a queue of unprocessed transactions would build up, and with a risk of making the network unable to process many of them if the number of transactions would remain at a high plateau.

"Meanwhile, Andresen must also wrestle with a serious problem with Nakamoto’s design. The Bitcoin network is incapable of processing more than seven transactions a second, a tiny volume for a technology with global ambitions. (Only about one Bitcoin transaction is made per second today, but most people who own Bitcoin do so to speculate on its price, not to pay for goods or services). Visa processes almost 480 transactions a second worldwide and can handle up to 47,000 a second at peak times.

“I’m worried about it and there’s a big debate in the Bitcoin community about how are we going to do this,” says Andresen. His favored solution is to increase the size of the “blocks” of transactions that get confirmed by the network of bitcoin miners every 10 minutes. If that doesn’t happen, then getting a transaction processed promptly will require paying a significant transaction fee to promote it ahead of others, he says. Not everyone agrees with Andresen’s proposed fix. Some opponents argue it would make Bitcoin more centralized. Larger blocks would make mining the currency so computationally intensive that only major corporations could do it, they say, giving them a kind of centralized power over the currency’s use." -- http://www.technologyreview.com/news/527051/the-man-who-really-built-bitcoin/

I think that's the point. Since transactions propagate so fast the confirmation time could probably be reduced safely.

Well thank god!  Without the noob crew showing up, we never would have known that we were doing it wrong all these years.

actually bitcoin transfers need a change
10 minutes it is too long and almost everything requires a minimum of two confirmations,that is at least 20 minutes to take a bitcoin to another address
too long nowadays

I dont really like the 10 minutes. its too long. Sometimes it can take even more time than that. 5 minutes is fine but 1 minute would be optimal for me.

That's not a guarantee, as infrastructure could be destroyed or damaged by some bad happenings (not going to go into conspiracy theories here) or the political situation may change restricting miner connectivity.

Then perhaps you should have researched this before creating a thread about "faster bitcoin transaction times," or posted your question in the beginner section.  There is a huge amount of discussion on this topic that you can learn from already.  

And it's not transaction times you're referring to anyways--it's confirmation times.  Bitcoin transactions are extremely fast as all that's required is for nodes on the network to accept the (valid) TX into mempool.

There are also several bitcoin clones with block-time targets at least as short as 30 seconds.  Look into these to understand how the block-time target affects orphan rates and convergence.  

In practice miners have fast Internet connections. I don't know the technical details of how newly discovered blocks are broadcast to all the miners. Maybe it's a cumbersome process. My assumption that the broadcast can be done in milliseconds is perhaps unrealistic.

Yes, however Bitcoin is desiged to be partially agnostic of lower OSI level protocols. With the proper agreement with authorities, I could be using GPRS to send blockchain data as opposed to an IP-level protocol. Thus, the protocol can't assume availability of the sub-second propagation of data across a TCP/IP link, and must be more conservative.

I found this:

"Ten minutes was specifically chosen by Satoshi as a tradeoff between first confirmation time and the amount of work wasted due to chain splits. After a block is mined, it takes time for other miners to find out about it, and until then they are actually competing against the new block instead of adding to it. If someone mines another new block based on the old block chain, the network can only accept one of the two, and all the work that went into the other block gets wasted. For example, if it takes miners 1 minute on average to learn about new blocks, and new blocks come every 10 minutes, then the overall network is wasting about 10% of its work. Lengthening the time between blocks reduces this waste." -- https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/FAQ#Why_do_I_have_to_wait_10_minutes_before_I_can_spend_money_I_received.3F

If the broadcast of a newly discovered block could be made very fast to all the miners, couldn't the transaction time be significantly reduced?