I just stumbled over this post while waiting for about 40 minutes now to get my $50 bitcoin transfer confirmed (just three confirmations needed, blockchain, go on, please, please...)
And this is not the first time I'm waiting. For me this clearly tells, that bitcoin isn't "ready for primetime" yet. It works well as a proof of concept, and beyond that. But imagine normal people doing normal daily payments with bitcoin. It's too slow, and besides that the whole blockchain mechanism certainly couldn't handle the amount of transactions if John Doe starts using bitcoin.
So the idea of having a merged second, considerably faster blockchain for small transactions seems quite useful to me. Perhaps you could even do multiple second chains somehow, to be able to handle enough transactions when usage keeps increasing.
And contrary to the proposed "just use another (Lite|Vert|Doge|Fast|whatever) coin" solution this mechanism should be included in the bitcoin wallet and be fully transparent to users. No mainstreet merchant will implement payment for 10 different coins or so. It should be just a on-click-bitcoin-payment and thats it.
Honestly, if you really tell people to use another coin, they will do exactly that in the long run. And there is no reason, why people should use bitcoin then at all. The "storage of wealth" argument is plainly wrong, as almost all other coins can be used for that, too. So people will store their assets in exactly the same coin they will use for daily payment. If on some day in the future this isn't bitcoin, it will get its place in history books as a nice proof of concept and will have no value any more.
Like the OP, I really think that bitcoin has a problem here. But as far as I can tell the big bitcoin buddys aren't interested in a solution (nor even in acknowleding the problem), though. We'll see, how this influences bitcoins future.
Just my 2 cent.
Partially agree, but there exist solutions today for fast Bitcoin payments. Just saw a video how normal people buying normal food from normal seller
using Bitcoins - they just scan QR code and that's it. Then I found this question on Stackoverflow that this is being done by relying just on existence of the transaction itself, without any confirmation. And that is "credit card fast". The thing is that the provider of this probably does accept a possibility of misuse and still goes OK since its fees are somehow good enough to cover those few cases. The seller is not in danger then and thus the whole concept is perfectly usable for common people.
Alternatively, you can have various "prepaid" products that would work "credit card fast" too and without even having a danger of being misused. Of course the trade-off here is to stick with a particular entity on both buyer and seller side.
And finally, Bitcoin is still extremely usable on the "bank to bank" level. Here you have oversees payments in matter of hours instead of 24hrs-10days banking system.
So I do not thing that the super-fast feature is crucial, I just say I would be interested in it if it is implemented somehow. I would even took the risk of hard fork for this feature. But that is just only me of course