Bitcoin Forum

Could someone please point me to a thread with a solution for faster Bitcoin verifications? Not Mybitcoin or Mt Gox Api; Is there a solution for "real-time" (or at least faster) Bitcoin p2p verifications?

If Yes, please help teach me.
If No, How are we supposed to develop eCommerce and bCommerce sites?

Cron job, download the blockchain, check if any transactions to your address are inroute, if >6 confirmations, process the transaction.

No idea how you'd go about doing that though.

There is no such thing as realtime verification. It might be implemented in the future, but the system would be quite complex.

What I propose you do is simply do not ship until verified - I mean, 10 minutes? If you are shipping a physical product that is a no brainer - if you are waiting for a music download or something digital that is probably no time to wait either.

Many online stores accept wire transfers, they do not ship until verified and that take days / weeks.

Run bitcoind with the monitortx patch, and ask Gavin to please clean it up and get it into Bitcoin soonest.

Accepting a transaction instantly is possible, however there is a risk of a double spend, i.e. a different transaction may make it into the block chain if your customer is trying to rip you off.

The chance should be small enough that an insurance company could come along and offer to guarantee your incoming transactions for a fee.

Such an insurance company would have several strategies available to lower their costs:

• Require a 2-second or so delay before guaranteeing a transaction
• Connect to a large number of nodes and make sure that during the aforementioned delay, no other transaction appears on the network
• Contract with and pay miners to guarantee they only have the transaction you got and will include it if they generate the next block

They could then offer an API to merchants that allows them to automate the process.

Theoretically merchants could do this themselves and carry the risk themselves, but it'll likely be much, much cheaper to have specialized companies do it.

And besides, if you're shipping physical products, you can wait an hour for six confirmations before sending the order to the warehouse. With credit cards the order would be sitting in the fraud prevention queue for this amount of time (or longer) anyway.

Thanks for the info: Does anyone have a code sample (or a link) to use the monitortx patch along with PHP?

You can find my version of the monitortx patch here (http://dl.dropbox.com/u/24777749/0001-New-RPC-calls-monitortx-monitorblocks-listmonitored.patch).

It should apply cleanly to bitcoind 0.3.22.

Thanks for the input + hopefully soon there will be easier options?

The whole Bitcoin economy is still under construction. Hope you brought a hard hat! :D

Yeah, becoming a merchant needs to be a lot easier (along with a bunch of other things).

The insurance company solution is interesting for future. For now the risk that somebody will double-spend you on a long-lived node is very, very small. If it happened you'd make Bitcoin history, in fact. So if you absolutely need real-time confirmations just accept zero-confirm transactions and live with the (low) risk. The attack that would allow you to be ripped off requires somebody to be mining with modified software. Currently the patches to do the Finney attack don't actually exist, or at least aren't public, so somebody would have to invest quite a bit of hardware and intelligence into the problem. Unless you're selling something very valuable, it won't be worth it to them.

just accept zero-confirm transactions...

Getting closer: I'm pretty good at figuring things out. Can anyone point me in the right direction to accept zero-confirm transactions in PHP? I guess use of the monitortx patch is assumed.
Thank you.