Topic: Faster transactions? - page 2. (Read 1405 times)

That's a very risky path to take for bitcoin's future... Eventually average joes will just use Litecoin instead for everything as they get used to it, better not allow competition to get that close.

Thanks for reply, I am aware of Litecoin and other coins, but that was not really my question. It was more about "can we make Bitcoin faster just with some kind of second blockchain?" and "is this question interesting?".

for store of wealth stick with bitcoin. for fast transactions, lets get merchants using litecoin for faster confirm times.

imagine bitcoin as the bank account that does wire transfers slowly and litecoin as the credit card..

Hi,

has there been a serious discussion on faster transactions in Bitcoin? Is a consensus that they are not needed or are there any technical problems that prevent this to be implemented?

What do I mean by faster transactions? From what I learned recently, it seems that to create an unconfirmed transaction out of nothing is possible and hence accepting any amount of payments with 0 confirmation is extremely risky. Rely on 1 confirmation seems to be OK for amounts under current block miner's revenue (say 25 BTC ~ 15000 USD), maybe the calculation should be made only a portion of a block revenue. Anyway, I stick with 15000 USD for this moment. 15000 USD sounds like a lot when we need something like 5 USD to confirm.

So, if we can confirm up to 15000 USD in 10 minutes, it might be interesting if we can confirm up to 1500 USD in 1 minute.

How to do that? We know that Namecoin can be mined simultaneously, so based on that knowledge I assume we can create a new blockchain similar to Bitcoin, with 10x faster block generation, meaning that we would accept as solution any hash that matches 10x smaller difficulty than Bitcoin's. But no new independent coins. We just use this new blockchain for confirmations of small transactions that we want to go faster. We can have a client that sends everything up to e.g. 1 BTC (600 USD now) using the faster chain.

Now my current knowledge of Bitcoin protocol does not allow me to go further in technical details on how to join faster chain coins with slower blockchain, but I believe this is just a technical and design obstacle that could be solved.

My questions:

1) To anyone with greater technical knowledge of Bitcoin protocol - is it really solvable as I believe or is there any super hard problem that would prevent that?

2) If this is possible and can be done, why is this not interesting? (I ask like that since I assume that if it was, someone would already came with that)