Payment contexts or scenarios | Bitcointalksearch.org

nevafuse

sr. member

Activity: 247

Merit: 250

Quote from: ?? on ??

I don't think I'm quite ready to wait for six confirmations to buy a soft drink. Actually, I'm pretty sure I don't even want to wait for one long block.

If you really wanted to steal from a vending machine, you could just break the glass/plastic. And $1 sounds like a small amount to go through the effort of double spending. The benefits of using bitcoin probably outweigh the risks of double spending. Like not having to collect the money, people stealing the money, using fake money, adsorbing credit card fees, etc. And since you are most likely connected to the internet anyways, the vending machine could use an intermediary to take the risk of double spending. Or only take mtgox or bitinstant credits for hopefully a smaller fee than credit cards. Lots of options.

joecascio

full member

Activity: 137

Merit: 100

Semi-retired software developer, tech consultant

@CornedBeefHash Thanks and yes, that's a good point. One of the reasons I'm putting this list together is to identify that kind of issue and decide how it could be handled. I will discuss all of this in a blog and post a reference to it in the "Press" section here.

All retail transactions have this issue of waiting for confirmations because the expectation is that they will be fast. Briefly, my thought on this is that bitcoin is no worse and may actually be better than credit cards in this respect because the actual payment of a credit card charge doesn't happen until the merchants transactions are "batched" at the end of the day. During that waiting time, the card holder can renege on the payment. Also, I think as a practical matter, double spending attempts will be relatively few and far between because a) most people are honest and b) you basically can't get away with it in the long run.

But it remains is an interesting problem to try to really fix.

Graet

vip

Activity: 980

Merit: 1001

In my country we have EFT Electronic Funds Transfer, I can "pay anyone" from my bank account with a bank branch identifier and an account number.

hxtop

hero member

Activity: 1071

Merit: 500

hi,I think the bitcoin should be a tool for pay,such as gamble ,vending,shopping guns ,and so on....

Stephen Gornick

legendary

Activity: 2506

Merit: 1010

Quote from: joecascio on August 09, 2012, 08:35:59 AM

Can you think of any others?

self-service vending