Topic: Paying with Bitcoin where there's rush - page 2. (Read 494 times)

Just explain to them what I've explained above. There are plenty of stores I shop in which accept zero confirmation non-RBF transactions for small purchases, and I'm not aware of any of them being scammed. It's just not worth the time and effort. For can set a price limit beyond which they want to wait for a confirmation or two.

Other possible options:

• Get them to use Lightning instead.
• Get them to open an account for each customer which you can deposit to in advance.
• Send them bitcoin as soon as you enter the store and have them refund the difference after you've checked out.
• In the case of a local farmers' market, I used to pay for goods and he would hold them for me while the transaction confirmed while I checked out some other stalls and then returned to pick up my goods. Now he is comfortable enough with bitcoin and I've bought enough stuff from him that he'll just accept my zero confirmation transaction.

An unconfirmed transaction definitely isn't settled, but neither is a credit card transaction. The point is an unconfirmed (non-RBF with a decent fee) bitcoin transaction is extremely difficult and probably very costly to reverse and can only be reversed for 10 minutes, whereas a credit card transaction is trivially easy to reverse for up to 6 months at almost no cost.

I honestly believe that it can work in practice, but how can you convince someone accept it if there's such a worrying drawback? On the other hand, you've already convinced them to accept credit & debit payments. Hmm, I don't know. It sounds plainly wrong to consider an unconfirmed transaction as settled, but you've made some good points.

This opens another discussion. Keep it on-topic.

It's now hard to fake cash because cashiers and grocery staffs are now smart when it comes to double-checking it. Unfortunately, small businesses are still often victimized by fake money especially elderly vendors. We're lucky because in our city, there's a single grocery store that accept Bitcoin which is really convenient to us.

Most businesses have bank account that is for business and the name of the company is registered in the country, all these will be looked into after someone will report the transaction, if it is a company's account, the bank will first have to contact the company of what is going on. It will be hard to fraud with this.

In a congested shopping mall, I still think it will be hard to use bitcoin for making payment, the 10 minutes on average confirmation time is another issue. The amount of fee used for bitcoin payment will not be known and the fee can be very low.

But if bitcoin ATM is used for the transaction, using a good fee that can get the transaction confirmed fast will be used and the transaction will not be RBF which can still make this possible by the shopping mall to accept non RBF transaction but which its fee is also high enough to get transaction confirmed very fast in 10 minutes on average, Bitcoin ATM can do that and the shopping mall can confirm if truly the transaction is not RBF transaction. This is solved.

Would be a risky option for a business owner to consider when it’s offline shopping, you don’t want to keep waiting for a transaction to be confirmed. I think it’s best to make use of Bitcoin when you’re making a purchase online and time is not a problem, that way both parties are able to wait for the transaction to be confirmed and not minding how long it’s going to take.

But, in a situation whereby you went to a store to buy something and you have to stand in a long queue to make transaction, this is not the best option as it is going to delay the process, so the store would want to use an option that would be faster for them.

what physical retailers know is this

those wanting to steal items of under $100, dont bother with chargeback crap. they dont even bother using counterfeit cash or cheques that bounce. because the whole 'witness' thing of security camera's and cashiers and fingerprint identity would get a person in alot of trouble for a small amount.
in those sub $100 amounts the thief would just put the item under their shirt, making sure they are not seen.. and just walk out without trying to pay.
its why the banks do not mind 'swipe and pay'/'tap and pay' apps/cards for items under $100 without need of entering a pin number.
because the likely hood is low of someone defrauding a purchase of low value but done so at a highly evidential/punishable crime if caught,

its why cheques have a 'guarantee card' that backs the balance over a certain amount. its why cards require a pin number over a certain amount. its why retailers do visual and UV light checks on large amounts of cash.
(hand a cashier 1x $10 they dont check it, hand a cashier 20x$10, they check every note twice)

if someone is spending say $5 with bitcoin, at a sit-down table service cafe. and it would cost a $2 tx fee to RBF one tx for another, someone is not going to waste the time and cost him 40% to try to defraud a coffee shop while knowing it takes the waiter 10 minutes to sit the person at a table and then make the coffee order and serve the coffee. especially when its then not only an embarrassment to then be confronted with your malicious act, but gets you in trouble for it too.
..so coffee shops wont worry about zero-confirms for such small amounts.

as for amounts of $20-$200. users dont want to have to pre-plan a months spending ahead of time and organise their funds into fiat accounts or altnet channels hoping that it will be enough to cover all possible spending. and then hope once its in these accounts/channels, they can use it freely.. instead they will find other same-day methods. EG buying a giftcard on their lunchbreak walk to starbucks or local deli/supermarket

these 'faster payment' altnets do have small use-cases and niche utility when all circumstances align and are well pre-planned and organised as to future spending habits. but they should not be seen as the replacement of bitcoin utility.
also these altnets should try better to highlight more of its own flaws, rather then try making bitcoin look useless to subtly mention their altnet

definitely not subtly advertising their altnet as a defacto solution to current issues with bitcoin. instead people need to see that its actually far easier to buy a giftcard using BITCOIN on a lunchbreak. then it is to lock up bitcoin to play on an altnet weeks before you even go to lunch.
and yes even in an altnet. there are ways of doing chargebacks. user refuses to sign its hubs latest commitment. forcing the hub to broadcast an older commitment, which the user can then use the revocation to chargeback on the hub.
as can the hub do the same against its customer

heck there are even "turbo" ways to fake a channel balance and fake a payment that is not backed by locked funds. (serious flaw)

blackmail/scamming/extortion can happen in altnets too. (but shh i been told to not mention flaws of altnets, oops.. they dont like it when i mention their flaws, whilst they are happy to try making bitcoin look bad and useless)

anyway. i dont need altnets and i dont need to exchange to fiat hours/days in advance. i do and can buy things in the real world using my bitcoin while at lunch/putting things in a shopping cart

I think that bitcoin lightning network will solve this late transactions confirmation problem to some extent. For a very small amount of transactions, i think the stores should allow other crypto currencies too so that paying a small amount is not hectic both in term of fee and time.

Cash is obviously the fastest and most final, but for a $200-300 grocery shopping far more people are paying with credit card or similar than are paying with cash. And every major retailer and the vast majority of smaller retailers still accept credit card with no issues whatsoever.

Well, if you keep doing it every few months, then your credit card provider will terminate your account. Just like if you claim your Amazon order didn't arrive once or twice they usually just send you a replacement, but if you do it constantly then your account gets terminated.

And once this person had defrauded the same supermarket two or three times, then said supermarket will ban them from their premises, just as they would if someone charged back their credit card multiple times or "accidentally" shoplifted multiple times.

The best thing that the owner of the bar would have done is to ask them to stay back until their transactions has been confirmed at least three times. I guess maybe he’s someone who doesn’t have a clue as to how cryptocurrency works.

This is his business, so it shouldn’t be something that he should play around, you don’t go around and just hop into a bar to drink and insist on paying with Bitcoin when you know for sure that isn’t normal. So, the vendor made a mistake by letting them go, he should have insisted on either getting paid in cash or they will have to wait till their transaction gets three to six confirmations before they are allowed to leave.

If they had the time to sit down and drink as much as they want, then they should as well have the time to wait for their Bitcoin transaction to be confirmed. If they refused, then he had right to call the police and get them arrested.

Please don't, stop, leave the thread and get some help.

You're correct, but that's up to credit.

When I pay with cash:

• The merchant sees the transaction immediately.
• The merchant receives the money immediately.
• The transaction is settled immediately and cannot be reversed.

There has to be a question, otherwise we'd all use this method to avoid such expenses once a few months. Contrarily, in Bitcoin, there's absolutely no question nor intermediaries to address to. I'm not saying many would attempt to defraud their merchants that way, but I can imagine a smartass who'd pay off few miners every few weeks, just to avoid giving his allowance at the supermarket.

In my country most retailers accept Bitcoin and Crypto currencies through Payment processors.... which is not the way true Bitcoiners wants bitcoins to be used, but it is a temporary solution. They do this, because they are not allowed to accept Crypto currencies as legal tender, so they bypass those lose and they accept bitcoins through a payment processor.. that will convert it into Fiat. 

The Lightning Network is a better solution.... but as you said.. "a big hassle" for bigger amounts. I hope this will improve as adoption grow in the future. 

The problem here is that people compare a credit card transaction being broadcast to a bitcoin transaction being confirmed, and then say bitcoin is too slow to use in person.

When I pay with a credit card:

• The merchant sees the transaction immediately
• The merchant receives the money in 3-5 business days
• The transaction can be reversed for 180 days

When I pay with bitcoin:

• The merchant sees the transaction immediately
• The merchant receives the money in 10 minutes
• The transaction can be reversed for 10 minutes

The two lines I have bolded are what people compare. Credit card transactions are hugely risky for the merchant. They don't receive any money for days, and the transaction be reversed for months. It is also almost trivial to reverse a credit card transaction. I can phone my card provider any time in the next 6 months and say my card was lost, stolen, skimmed, phished, whatever, and for a value of $200-300 most will reverse it without question. Compare this with how difficult and costly it is to reverse a non-RBF bitcoin transaction, which must be done within a time frame of only 10 minutes on average.

And yet, almost every merchant accepts credit card transactions and experiences minimal fraud.

Also, see this quote:

Bitcoin may not be used to shop where there are many customers to buy from shops but bitcoin is good to be used when shopping online from your home or workplace, there are times you will have to consider using lighting network or just use altcoin like USDT on Tron blockchain which take just 1 minutes before it will be confirmed. There are many exisitng means this can be done.

It can be as a rules on the shopping mall that anyone that want to use bitcoin for payment should wait for 10 minutes and giving them instructions about the fee to be used to make their transaction get confirmed very fast and that it may take long than 10 minutes some times, but this may be difficult and would be better not to have even tried it because if not done well, it can lead to congestion of customers in the shopping mall.

I agree that bitcoins are not the most practical crypto currencies for fast every day shopping. While long queues are one thing in the supermarket, in my country the self check out became very popular. To quickly scan and leave will probably not be possible. There might some alternatives however. One would be that there are scanners now in the supermarket, so you can walk around and scan the items when putting them into your basket. Paying directly in the middle of the supermarket and then there could be a confirmation until you walk to your car and leave. Another thing could be that a mobile wallet works together with the supermarket chain and the wallet operator would guarantee the payment as long as there is enough coins on the wallet. Its like with credit cards. The supermarket doesn't directly get the money either when using a card. It takes some time for the actual money to be transfered. Only on paper they are instantly credited.

Regardless of the speed issue and security feature of the Bitcoin talk we have here. Volatility is what really the big issue and hindrance on why a physical store rarely accepts Bitcoin. You can easily pay the cashier in an instant by just handling over your cash in your wallet to the cashier, It will be a gamble too on there business when they will accept an asset that price can go up and down more than 10% on a single day. Imagine your business is working properly using fiat current system? Do you think you will still venture out on risky crypto world in terms of price volatility? I have a lot of business owner friends that has crypto investment but they are not implementing crypto to there business because they know how the price movement behave when there's trend so they usually just put money on it that they can afford to lose.

I quite agree with you here but I will say that the club owner should have insisted that the guys wait until the transaction is complete since they were the ones that insisted on paying with bitcoin even if it takes 24hrs Why would more businesses want to accept bitcoin with this type of news when the people in the system are the ones sabotaging its adoption.

There are ways to overcome these things. May be a good synch software that can catch up the broadcasted transaction immediately. I am not sure how many of you used Roobet casino, but whenever I press send button from my wallet within 20-30 seconds Roobet picks up the transaction right away. Its like instant deposit to the account.

I'm sure it won't be impossible thing to do in the supermarket store where millions of transactions goes on every month.

Surely, infra can be built for that so no need to be in line for this. Apart from this you can just get crypto currency debit or credit card and workout whole thing. 

I still believe until reality proves me otherwise that due to Gresham's law people are going to tend to spend what are garbage coins and save Bitcoin. That is not to say that no one is going to pay in Bitcoin, there are many daily Bitcoin transactions, and I do make small purchases from time to time, even though I am accumulating. What I mean is that if you have fiat and you have bitcoin it doesn't make much sense to spend a currency that tends to appreciate quite a bit and keep a currency that is devaluing by leaps and bounds.

Even if cryptocurrency payments became widespread, I think there would be some shitcoin that would be the main one used for day-to-day payments, and not Bitcoin. If we add to this the problems of confirmation time and the fact that LN does not seem to be a solution to scale all payments globally, even less so.

Using centralized platforms is still the far easier solution for now, unfortunately. Through the likes of Cash App or something similar to Coinbase's off-chain instant transactions. I know this requires KYC, but yea I think we're not close to having Lightning being bug-free enough to be used in a mass scale.

well he brought up the topic. so lets deal with it

bitcoin is a digital currency. its not meant as a replacement of fiat, its meant as a side option. for people that want better security
imagine it as a savings account without needing a government ID to open an account
imagine it as a offshore family trust fund without the lawyers and bank managers

bank cards are known as 'pull payments' where by they need your banking details and name and all the security to pull funds. meaning this can be used maliciously later without your authorisation..
bitcoin is a push payment. once confirmed its done. no promises to settle later, no punishment, refunds/chargebacks. no respending or rebalancing.

bitcoin works perfectly when buying stuff that gets delivered later. i do grocery shopping, and other online orders with delivery and the merchant gets the confirms before boxing/bagging the goods up

for the retail store stuff. you can convert some coin to giftcard.
no need to lock funds up for a month preplanning all possible spending and then split it into different channels and then have to rebalance if certain nodes are offline or funds are in the wrong channel...
no need to put funds into exchanges and linking bank accounts and again planning spending habits days/weeks ahead

instead with real bitcoin (not altnet peg-locked to bitcoin) you simple decide you are going to starbucks. buy a giftcard as you leave the house and have the giftcard ready before you arrive at starbucks.

no need to pre-plan to lock up a month of value and hope that you can spend that value if all the utopian circumstances align right.
and hope the rest of the value wont be 'auto-pilot-route' spent by other partners your linked to.

with bitcoin you have full control. and only you have control of your funds. no partner co-signing. no lock-in's for lengthy periods. no 'will x-y-z be online and liquid' worries

just spend what you want when you want how you want without preplanning days/weeks ahead, no pre-requisut of someone else signing off on your decisions of how you spend your bitcoin.

ive personally done some grocery shopping online with bitcoin. and also been walking around (uk version) of walmart, filling my (trolley)shopping cart while getting a giftcard using bitcoin and simply paying as i reached the (till)cashier. no waiting around at the cashier desk annoying other shoppers.

oh and the alnet that relies on locking funds up to then peg faster payments of different units of measure. if using a legit piece of software requires waiting atleast 6 confirms before "funding locked". thus its not something you can simply jump in and out of at a whim

i can get a giftcard far faster then setting up an altnet channel

i used to use my debit card 3-5 times a day. now i use it maybe once every few months. but i do onchain purchases 3-5 times aday