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Well...   not actually "instant", but he could have though of 'faster' transaction confirmations.

When someone of his skills and imagination is on his path to create a decentralized digital currency, how is the transaction times are not given the most important thought process? I'm sure it isn't hard to imagine instant transactions in today's worls when email is the medium of daily communication which delivers messages in matter of seconds?


EDIT:
Had to change "Transactions" to "Confirmations" in title since it was a slightly misleading in terms of what I wanted to convey.

That's how he envisioned and created Bitcoin. The transactions are instant. However, confirmations are not... :)

Transactions are instant, are you referring to confirmation?

I have done a lot of transactions all happens in usually 1-2 seconds or less.

confirmed  :P

The problem is with vendors/sites that force you to wait for multiple confirmations -- the worst are ones that still make you wait for 6 confirmations. I could see it if we were still in 2010... but zero confirmation transactions should be the norm. See: Bitpay.

I've seen it on luckyb.it for the first time. Is there any practical reason for requiring confirmations?

I read somewhere(cant remember now) that Crypto 2.0 has instant transactions like stellar, ripple that's why bitcoin should be updated to 2.0

I believe companies like coinbase make their transactions "off blockchain" so they happen instantly, then push all transactions out afterwards.  someone correct me if i'm wrong

Guaranteeing the funds aren't double spent, or there isn't any attack that can reverse or redirect funds. Just a security precaution that can be used with our current PoW scheme :)


I guess Bitcoin is already updated then :D

As the posters above already said, transactions are pretty much instantaneous but confirmations take 10 minutes each on average. Here's a post by Satoshi where he discusses the feasibility of a shorter block generation times (and thus shorter confirmation times):


Confirmations can be made faster by increasing the rate at which new blocks are found. Problem is, if new blocks are being generated too quickly then you start to see problems with the blockchain temporarily splitting due to network propagation delays. According to one figure from 2013, the mean time for a node to see a new block in the network was 12.6 seconds. If two miners oblivious to each other happened to mine blocks simultaneously, one of these blocks will fail to become part of the main chain. This is called an orphan block. The faster the blocks are generated, the more orphan blocks you will get.

Satoshi probably thought 10 minutes was a reasonable trade-off. Seeing as though Litecoin doesn't have any major issues with orphan blocks and orphan chains despite having 2.5 minute blocks vs. Bitcoin's 10 minutes, perhaps his choice was a bit on the conservative side.

Lately I have been using coffee.foldapp.com (https://coffee.foldapp.com/) to buy Starbucks. It has always worked almost instantly, so they obviously don't wait for a confirmation.

As was mentioned above, the only reason for a merchant to wait for a confirmation is to prevent a double-spend. If I wanted to cheat Foldapp out of my $5 Starbucks drink, I would have to hand-craft a transaction that sent the $5 back to me, then inject both it and the "real" transaction to the network at the same time. However, if I don't insert the transactions at the right place on the network, and the "fake" transaction gets to Foldapp, while the "real" transaction gets to a minor, then if I wanted my latte, I would have to contact Foldapp and explain what happened.

The point being that there isn't a big risk of not waiting for the confirmation to a coffee vendor.

For larger transactions, such as an exchange, it makes more sense to wait for confirmations, but that's more like a stock purchase, where the investor expects the transaction to take a while.

I think these large transactions are analogous to using my PayPal balance to purchase something: The purchase is instant, but it takes 3 days to transfer money from my bank account to my PayPal balance.

at the moment of releasing the code into the wild he expected the community to take over and include certain features when needed. i guess at some point in the future the core devs will probably make confirmations faster and decrease block rewards.

It already exists, when you pay with bitcoin in a restaurant you dont have to wait at all, you just scan and done. Although if you are buying an aircraft carrier its better to wait for 6 confirmations.

I didnt know that bitcoin is applied in restaurants could you send me any link/video that bitcoin is applied there.

When Satoshi left, his work was not finished. You can tell by his last posts he intended to do much more.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=3;sa=showPosts;start=0

Then, he mysteriously vanished with his coins (and the alert keys).

Just search youtube paying with bitcoin, there are plenty if you check www.coinmap.org you can see all of restaurants worldwide that accept btc.

I remember he predicted almost everything, including the transaction confirmation time and the centralization of mining over time. Transactions itselves are instant tho.

Stellar had a flawed consensus protocol that led to a fork. It was temporarily resolved by running the whole Stellar network on a single verifying node, which is not decentralized. Stellar and Ripple have not been tested as long as Bitcoin and can only prove they are as reliable by running for years without problems.

http://www.coindesk.com/stability-questions-dog-ripple-protocol-stellar-fork/

the thing to be instant would be good but well double spent would be a nice moove soo better stay with confirmations.... soo lets say in a restaurant would be good just to see the transaction that appears in minutes on the wallet confirmation can take 30 minutes or less 

He imagined instant transactions and all will be confirmed after 10 minutes on average. That is a fairly quick system. I know sometimes we can't even get 1 confirmation in an hour, that's to do with luck and difficulty mechanism.

Can bitcoin be updated like stellar and ripple (stellar it's like ripple as it use almost all things that ripple use)

It would no longer be decentralized if it was updated to be like Stellar. I think a single verifying node is still running the whole Stellar network because of the fork. A government could switch off the server hosting that node and close the whole Stellar network. It's impossible to do that to the Bitcoin network, which is why it was invented.

A new consensus protocol has been devised for Stellar but I don't think its been deployed yet. This link explains it and says the earliest it will be deployed is this summer.

http://www.coindesk.com/stellar-founder-jed-mccaleb-new-protocol/

Well i'm learning more day by day, didnt know about this how works stellar. Btw, i like bitcoin and maybe that reason you gave thats why it is so popular right now and will be more in near future.

Transactions are instant,but not confirmed instantly, you can't make instant confirmations without making it unsecure

It's really a non-issue for me. There are loads of 3rd party services you can use that implemented "off-chain" instants transactions.

Let's keep in mind, that Satoshi's protocol was still a work in progress and acctually still is... This can still be solved now.

Let's give him/her/them credit for all the other bases that was covered.... It's simply brilliant, and shows that no technology is perfect.  :P :P :P

What is the need for instant confirmations ? Once a transaction is sent doesn't it get confirmed after sometime, so how does it matter ? We just have to wait for one confirmation while trading to avoid double spends. In rest of the cases its hardly a worry.

well the bitcoin architecutre depends on the more miners of diff find blocks and never could be instant the bolckchain need to find and store the perfect transactions of the last 10 mins but usualy 3 confirms do that and 30 mins a transaction its very much better than 2 days banks btc its a bank for itself

How quickly your transactions get confimed, it depends on how much of your paid fees. The more fee you pay, the more priority of your transactions!

satoshi said specifically that faster confirmations are not needed because even in the case that a remote attack could be done with fewer confirmations, or with zero confirmation the thing that matter is node propagation

basically if the attacker has not enough nodes to propagate his attack, his attack would be useless

It is a precautious meature! Satoshi probably haven't thought the 51% attack issues, which haven't been completely resolved yet! It just relies on the big mining farms' self discipline.

Yes of course I was referring to instant 'confirmations'. Even one instant confirmation will be very helpful in order to process some of the daily payments in retail stores etc. against the 10 minutes block time we currently have. There could have been a system where teh first confirmation took just seconds, and then more confirmations would follow in next blocks. This would have been very helpful for small payments.

Probably there could have been a way for him to think of shorter block times. Or probably he thought 10 minutes was good enough compared to traditional money transfer systems.

as far as i know wallets like coinbase that are working off the chain have instant transaction / confirmation as long as both recipient and sender have that wallet. and the issue that OP talks about still exist if one of them does not have that wallet (has other wallet than coinbase for example).

but this has nothing to do with bitcoin. it is like using a bank. you don't actually send the money (physically) you send a bunch of numbers and they receive those numbers and it adds to their balance.

The problem is that confirmations cant be instant, thats basic, it need some times to the network to confirm it, i think he mean that satoshis should think on a faster way.

btw we can always think on a better/faster way to made it yes?

ripple and stellar work differently. they don't have a blockchain, their design works more like a state machine tracking and updating the amounts in each user account. though they're not technically as centralized as other posters here suggest, these instant transactions come at the cost of privacy. creating more than one account per user is discouraged (because it costs XRPs). you can't create a new address for each transaction. so you'll mostly have only one account with everything in it. further, guess what's happening? latest news is KYC and AML is being enforced on ripple by the authorities. just because it's technically possible. so no surprise there, really.

SInce there exists payments systems like Ripple, there wasn't anything that would stop it from being confirmed immediately. It definitely could have been implemented.

well if those really goes forward we would see bitcoin on several more places then it is currently pay a coffe a dinner a pizza like with cards would be amazing

Please read the replies before writing. This is a common misconception with Bitcoin.
Transactions are almost instant (usually 2-3 seconds at most), it is the confirmations that are taking time. For example Starbucks could easily accept transactions with zero confirmations as their risk would be only a few dollars usually.

Wrong. He actually mentioned it in the original paper. Maybe the term 51% attack was used later.
Section 6: Incentive, last paragraph (https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf).
He actually even talked about it in 2008 (http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.encryption.general/12598).

Bitcoin is instant. However if you accept transactions without confirmations by miners, you would be taking the burden of proof on yourself and that's the problem with Bitcoin malleability. Think mt.Gox

Cheers

you can cross check against double spends with zero confirmations by querying the mempool of a few random nodes.

Some of the gambling sites I use allow for 1 confirmation to except the transaction or deposit. So for me it is not such a big issue. I will agree with you that it would become a problem if I had to pay for a cup of Java and by the time the confirmation comes through the coffee will be cold. On smaller transactions this might become a bigger problem.

sidechain can solve this issue without any problem, i don't see other solution, because the block confirmation time will never be changed in the future, so the other way is playing with another chain, unless some one can come up with something more efficient

In this ERA where every thing has been put on just "One Click" .
Then why not BITCOIN ?

As it is peer-to-peer currency,and it will get more popular in next years where all wants to get their instant result.  :)

That is the answer! If a merchant knows the transaction is well propagated throughout the network, then the chance of a double-spend transaction being accepted is very small.

Very few transaction need to be confirmed instantly.
I really don't see the problem by having ~10 min confirmation time.
No body is going trough all the trouble with double spend $1 for a cup of coffee.
Buying a house or car......  well, then would it be needed to wait for a couple of confirmations, not really a problem.

Well by some logic; if confirmations were to be "easier" that would be the weakest link in the chain, since confirmations are in fact solved blocks since the transaction was made,
and if you were to have instant confirmation, you would loose that security. It's impossible to do the "hard work" instantly, that is, by current bitcoin state and the way it's working.

cheers

i didnt express corrected what i wanna say were the confirmations become instant anyway with fiat you eat drink and pay and done with bitcoin is a delay,soo maybe a reduce on the time of 1 confirmation or two would be enought

How could you work with a DECENTRALIZED blockchain wihtout spreading all the transactions over the nodes and making confirmations to be sure they have been properly spread

that's not what a confirmation is.  a confirmation means it's been included in a block.  blocks take time to solve.

Satoshi thought of many things but not everything.

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I think the transaction usually happens instantly, it just takes a while for blockchain to confirm it. Although I've experienced transactions where I've sent from 1 wallet to another and it did take 1 or 2 hours. That was my first withdraw with btc, I thought I did something wrong, LOL.  ;)

in some cases indeed it could happen, that the number of address used dikarenakn atupun fee amount is too small, so think about the amount of the fee before sending if the transaction want a quick confirmation by miner

stellar, ripple, next and crypto.. are not blockchain technologies.. they are crappy centralised databases.. like the fiat banking system.. try not to think that centralised databases are better, or you will be ignoring the beauty of what bitcoin is.

Well in a future ,in around 100years mining will be dead for bitcoin ,over... soo how long should the confirmation time should became on those?

I think... more confirmations means more secure. So why do we asking for instant confirmations if it's less secure???

OP is talking about instant confirmation, not instant transaction. And btw transaction is useless until confirmations are provided by the network,
because transactions can be abused, where confirmation of the transactions is guaranteed by the network and offer security.

cheers

How the fuck would you solve the Byzantine Generals' problem with instant confirmations? It is just not possible. To ensure a reliable consensus the blocks must be given enough time to propagate across the network multiple times.

With the advent of bigger blocks and the accompanying larger propagation delays the last think you want to be thinking about is lowering confirmation times.

I think some services use multiple confirmations to prevent double spending issue. Confirmation time depend on which block is your transaction included in and network hashrate.

loppil. Did you know that the word "racecar" is a palindrome?  ???

Instant confirmations are bad for your breath.

This is my pet peeve with bitcoin. If it's instant, let it be that way. Don't make me wait for more than 1 confirmation.

Think of confirmations as security.

If you deposited a personal check from a total stranger 1/2 way around the world how long would you wait for it to clear ??

Checks can be returned sometimes several days or even weeks later ... the longer the time that goes by the more security you have.

Credit cards can be reversed instantly so there is no security there.


Compared to traditional systems bitcoin is actually very fast.

Also the 6 confirnation rule is / was chosen as a 'safe number...

There are academic papers published that show waiting more confirmatikns than six is safer and less is more risky.

It happens same for me, it shows me unconfirmed at first, however as minutes click I got the messages shows the confirmed, usually this process takes me more or less 5 - 6 minutes. But everything is safe and secured, for those minutes I was bit scared LOL...

well said ! the example was good too !
but I am wondering why it takes so much of time to have the 6 confirmations ?
couldn't it be faster than now ?

Yes, faster confirmation times are very important. If you have let say 500 confirmations - complete BTC transfer times can be 15 minutes or more  ;)

then use altcoin, which are faster in confirmation, but only choose the most stable between all those alt

dash and monero are a good choice

Very good point.

Most of the people who are demanding "faster" confirmations don't really understand the topic.
It all boils down to how much hashing power is needed to rewrite the ledger. 

A weak altcoin (or a faster block version of altcoin) isn't going to gain more security.

Satoshi followed through on the crypto coin idea, that had been floating around in a white paper since the 90s. He created this proof of concept crypto currency, secure and decentralized. Don't think he was concerned with transaction speed, he wanted to prove a concept first... and he succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.

well it would be good that a confirmation could take only 10 minutes this would be the best for all who pay and who receive soo would keep the protection .