Topic: Is the long block confirmation time a problem? - page 2. (Read 3305 times)

Satoshi knew what he was doing with the confirmation times, its a great balance between speed, orphans and importantly space. Yes I know HDD memory isn't expensive but massive blockchain does cause problems. Look at the rate of growth of some of the fast confirming coins blockchains and imagine the size of them in 10 years if they grew in transaction size to the point of BTC.

I think the problem here is more with a Bitcoin ATM which is designed to wait for 1 confirmation.  There's still plenty of work to be done in the space of "fast payment verification" and I'm looking forward to see further market solutions (green addresses was one).

Deposit banks are one part of a solution.  People would keep some of their bitcoins in a bank and the ATM would be able to accept transactions from the bank with no confirmations.  This could be arranged to maintain anonymity.

A little more sophisticated: Payment insurance companies would allow people to pay with bitcoins quickly and directly.  Such a company will charge a subscribing merchant a monthly fee and require the merchant to reject certain transactions it deems invalid in a short time window (say 5 seconds).  It will pay out in full if any of the transactions it deems valid in that 5 second window are successfully double-spent.  Consequently, the insurance company would have a strong incentive to make sure they are very good at detecting potential double-spends, while letting through as many innocent transactions as possible.  They would be well-connected to the network and would probably spend a lot of money analysing the blockchain.

This isn't really a problem for the core devs.  Besides, ensuring that sufficient decentralisation is maintained as the network scales is a more pressing concern.

Finally, while this is a problem for Bitcoin's adoption today, it is important to note that cryptocurrencies which have the same essential model as Bitcoin but simply set a lower confirmation time are not solving the problem, they are just adjusting the balance between this problem and that of orphans.  I'm wary of this approach, simply because the orphans problem becomes more serious as the network scales.

How would having like paper wallets with $20 of btc on it work? We could carry slips of paper around, and when we had to pay for something, here's a .05 btc bill.. Other person would scan  it to check balance and confirm, and then you would hand over paper wallet. Quicker than 6 confirms right?

It's just becoming more and more of an exaggerated nuance as I deal with various alt-coins. I transfer my LTC/DOGE back and forth from my wallets, exchanges, services, etc... and all is swell. I come back to Bitcoin and it's hard to ignore it.

You bet it is. No matter how other people try to whitewash bitcoin, long confirmation time is the biggest problem of mass adoption of bitcoin right now.

I just went to a bitcoin ATM operated by robocoin. The other day I sold 1000 worth of bitcoins and I got 1 confirmation in 5 minutes.
the atm just needed 1 confirmation and it took 45 mins to get 1 confirmation today for 500 worth of bitcoins.

A shop owner that I talked to was also so pissed of with bitcoin that he wanted to puke. Everytime someone orders something, waiting for the confirmation is just way too long. So if bitcoin is not "over-the-counter" ready, then it is not ready for mass adoption.

Perhaps buying a pizza or something cheap isn't a big problem...

I strongly suggest the developers to focus more on this issue.

https://www.google.com/search?safe=off&espv=2&es_sm=93&q=confirmation+time+bitcoin&oq=confirmation+time+bitcoin&gs_l=serp.3..0i19j0i5i30i19j0i8i30i19l3.13333.15881.0.16032.7.7.0.0.0.0.74.320.7.7.0....0...1c.1.39.serp..0.7.312.CKEsFGSbTnk

That is why most would say bitcoin is not designed for over-the-counter payments. I think we are stuck with this block time, but we can develop off chain payment systems

I have been spending a lot of time thinking about this lately and I keep coming to the same conclusion...It's definitely an inconvenience when you compare it to something like Litecoin.

Yes, I understand that for small purchases vendors can just accept 1 confirmation or 0 confirmations but for every other transactions it can take upwards of 10 minutes...or an hour if you need 6-10 confirmations like a deposit to an exchange

like i said, probably not a big deal but is there any room to change this in the future? or are we stuck with this forever?