Topic: If Satoshi was a "genius", then why do BTC transactions take so long? - page 4. (Read 7583 times)

a supermarket isn't going to make you wait around so they can be certain the 500 dollar drop in the bucket you're spending with them clears.

they currently wait 30-90 days for your credit card to clear.

as soon as it shows up on the blockchain with 0 confirmations, your good.

or perhaps there could be a system where a human stands at the end and watches you make the transaction from your phone.

you must have read this by now....or was your account hacked

its to do with latency , and speed of transmission across globe.

And with Bitcoin, the intermediary can be the vendor himself, so they don't have to pay Visa to do that for them.  If Wal-Mart accepted bitcoins at the counter, they could manage transaction validity checks just fine without hiring some outside contractor.

I still don't understand why some people don't get it.

Just like you pay dollars with your credit card at the supermarket you will be paying with BTC with the same transaction time.
The "intermediary"  will confirm you have enough coins in your account and make the transaction.
The merchant will ONLY have to wait 10 minutes to get his coins.

Simple.

 

Worst. Analogy. Evar.

That's not exactly comparing like with like.  The credit/debit card system is designed to operate this way.  

A better comparison is a bank transfer which, here in the uk, usually only takes a minute or so.

Also, even a 1 minute delay would be too long to wait in many situations. Especially as that would be the average and some confirmations would take longer. When I'm paying by credit card at a supermarket, if it takes as much as 10 seconds it annoys me. When I've finished and paid I don't want to hang around, waiting. So faster confirmation times don't really help unless they are a lot faster, like 50 times faster.

(I don't know whether Satoshi made this point, and don't much care.)

Transactions average 1.4 seconds from anywhere to anywhere.  Transaction clearing is what blocks are doing.  Transaction clearance for credit cards take between 30 and 45 days.


Yes he did.  He chose the 10 minute interval because it was a long enough period to prevent orphaned blocks, most of the time, due to more than one node discovering a block solution within the time period it takes to propagate a block from one edge of the network to the other.  He was assuming that, in a future that Bitcoin was wildly successful, blocks would be very large data sets and the p2p network would be very large; both contributing to network delays that might extend the time for a block to propogate from edge to edge for up to a whole minute.  Therefore, in order to limit the risk of orphaned blocks (and the blockchain splits that often accompany them) the target interval had to be several times longer than the worst case scenario for block propogation delays.  He also wanted the interval to fit neatly into human time cycles for our mental convience.  He could have done a 6 min block interval, for 10 per hour, but he was concerned that wouldn't be enough.  His fears seem correct, because even with the 10 minute interval we average about 1.5% of blocks released onto the network are orphaned.  A 6 minute interval would make that much worse, and 2 minute interval would make that rate simply awful.

This is one of my favourites, but it still doesn't quite answer your questions.

You can just look him up for yourself, like a normal forum member.

Some of those early conversations are much clearer and easy to get 'it' into my thick head.

Another trick is to invert the date order in bitcoin discussion. See you in 3 months!

It's a tradeoff between the granularity of confirmations and the probability of creating orphans. Satoshi actually picked a pretty good sweet spot.

I edited the OP, to be more clear:

Edit:

Almost everything related to BTC transaction times, but discuss it if you wish.




I wanted to learn what Satoshi said about it, and someone did answer, thanks
Also interested in more related Satosho quotes if you have any.

Correct!
That would also probably mean that Bitcoins will be mined sooner than expected.

Transactions don't take long, confirmations do.

this exact question was asked a couple weeks ago.. so again

imagine 5 years ago satoshi seen that banking does things in 3-5 days and originally came up with a concept of bitcoins confirming in 30 minutes.. a bit of debate ensued and every agreed on 10 minutes.

now imagine if today bitcoin was invented (instead of 2009). and the confirm time was agreed as 2 minutes... in 5 years time your future successor would be on a forum complaining that 2 minutes is a long time and you want a 40 second confirm time.

now imagine if in 5 years time bitcoin was invented (instead of 2009) with a 40 second confirm time.. your successor would complain and want a 8 second confirm time,

blah etc blah... endless loop of arguements

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.3819

If Michael Jordan was a "great basketball player", then why did he only score 30 points per game?

^^^^ What he/she said.
Bitcoin is the fastest electronic payment protocol in existence.

You can compare it to a creditcard payment, the transaction takes places almost instantly.

With a creditcard sweeping your card only confirms you have the funds to pay, but the actual payment is done days later and can be charged back up to 90 days.

If you're trading for a lot of money waiting for a couple confirmations is in fact really short comparing it to other payment methods.

I think you're confusing transactions with confirmations. The former is almost instant.

10 min is nothing compare to current banking system. Heck even a check deposit can takes days to confirm.

However both transactions are instant (bitcoins and check deposits). My transactions are always broadcasted and instantly in queue (that means its very hard, nearly impossible, for me to double spend it unless i'm an operator of GHash lol)

I believe Satoshi thinks 10min is an appropriate time required for a global payment network. I dont think faster confirmation times would give any benefit but potential nonstop-able forking in case of attack.