Bitcoin Forum

So if someone sent a payment 20 minutes ago, they still would not have seen any confirmations.

I think confirmation time is one of the major drawbacks of Bitcoin going mainstream and local because lets say someone went to a bar, and ordered their drinks and its time to pay. They pay, and would have to sit at the bar for 23 minutes until they even got one confirmation?

And as I am typing this, I sent a payment at xx:53 and its now xx:18 and only have gotten one confirmation because just a second ago the block was mined. 23 minutes for and 0 confirmations is pretty slow

What are your opinions?

Credit card payments aren't fully verified either, and yet all merchants accept them. Part of the cost of each credit card transaction pays for the fraudulent transactions that happen on a daily basis.

Furthermore, no one will attempt a double-spend for a $5 drink. Its very expensive to do, so it would only happen for larger amounts.

Cool, I did not know that double spending is expensive to do. Mind explaining how double spending is done? And what the costs are?

block height 260292 took 23 minutes... oh now lets make some panic news that bitcoin is too slow to use...
block height 260293 took 2 minutes... silence, no complaints
block height 260294 took seconds... silence, no complaints
block height 260295 took seconds... silence, no complaints
block height 260296 took 4 minutes... silence, no complaints
block height 260297 took 6 minutes... silence, no complaints
need i say more

yeah but for the people who get caught in the 23 minute block it sucks, and it is slow.

well most of the time you'll need 6 confirmations, which takes about 1 hour.

so if 1 of the 6 blocks took 23 mins and other blocks to 5 mins or seconds. kinda mostly always evens out to about 1 hour...

yep its suppose to even out to 1 hour per 6 confirms..

but with so many ASICS hitting the pools daily, the retarget of difficulty is happening sooner and sooner to try to stablise the delay's or super speeds of confirms.

imagine it if each retarget was still a 2 week gap.. we would have at first some nice 10minute gaps.. then during the week, moving down minutes, then to seconds per confirm.. then after a week of super fast confirms, it retargets (to even out to a months worth of averaging 10 minutes).. making the next 2 weeks take a couple hours per confirm, just to counter the 'few seconds' confirms in previous week.

I think Bitcoin, like gold, will be reserved for larger transactions and other coins, most likely Litecoin, will be for day to day use.

its not days like a wire transfers, but i agree with you, the ability to safely accept 0 confirmation BTC payments should be invented. and i've been thinking about this today (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=302990.0).

the idea seems to have merit, but i'm not a bitcoin dev.
as far as i can tell, checking 2 simple things would allow for safely accepting 0 confirmation BTC payments, in 30-60 seconds or maybe less!
it would be interesting to see this idea implemented, so people can try to break it.

for most larger tx you'd want the full 6 confirmation, but for small payments that you need to go fast, this simple yet ugly approche might just do the trick...

also, other people have been dreaming up far more elegant ways around this problem.

a centralized solution would be very easy to implement, but that would be cheating.

Weird, I literally just sent a donation to the dev for coinbase trader app 20 mins ago (from now, which is 8:10pm EST)  and got my first confirm ~7 mins ago?

http://blockchain.info/tx-index/b66086f787a151e29739e57677698a4c568355db7de8f234b8fc6aa906536895

since when did they reduce the re-target from 2 wks?

it's like every 2016 blocks isnt it?

I agree with this..


yeah the solution for faster confirmations is definitely something this market needs right now. Scalability doesn't seem like an issue, but confirmations seem like the only bottleneck from Bitcoin competing with POS services like visa

It's the trade-off for non-centralized, non-reversible currency.

And I can think how easily these could be given away even in bitcoin. For convenience...

The solution which might happen is to move online banking kind of system.

Just have payment processors have accounts on multiple banks/online wallets. And have them deduct funds instantly, inside the wallet/bank. The merchant should then be also able to have funds instantly.

I see that as very real possibility, not proffered one, but one that can happen for regular people.

a centralized approach


create a account at wendys.com send bitcoins, wait 1 hour, and then use the funds in that account ( controled by wendys.com) to insatnly pay for a wendys bergur.

sure.

but we can do better

we can make 0 confirmation payments safe to accept! by requiring some rules as to how the TX should go


the idea is:

If a TX (with a miners fee), is broadcast, and no double spends accourcs 60 seconds after this TX has been broadcast, we can assume this TX will be confirmed, EVEN IF a double spend is initiated after the 60 seconds. because miners validating TXs he will see the first tx ( the one that occurred 60 seconds before the double spend attack) as the valid one.

so....

If you get a payment, make sure it has a miners fee, look for double spends for 60 seconds. if you see no double spends, you can be sure it will get confirmed, even if a double spend is initiated later.


thats the idea. I understand this is an ugly solution, but if it works.... "Safely accept 0 conf. BTC payments in 60 seconds!"  ;D

One option is if we end up with a few large pools controlling the majority of network. They could dictate that only first TX send to network is accepted and keep list of accepted queued TXs. Also they could orphan the blocks that don't follow these rules. So in this case you could get confirmation in few seconds just by checking their publicly available lists. You could maybe even allow updating the TX if original transactions are still valid.

Though they would have to be trusted. But they could orphan each others bad blocks too.  

C'mon guys!

Its not that bad!!

It could be wayyy worse you know.

> because lets say someone went to a bar, and ordered their drinks and its time to pay. They pay, and would have to sit at the bar for 23 minutes until they even got one confirmation?

Like mentioned already, it's expensive to do a double spend, so no one in their right mind would attempt to do it in order to get a "free" drink.

95% of real-world transactions such as the one you mention aren't significant money: groceries, restaurants, day-to-day shopping, etc. There's very small risk of any fraud happening with such purchases, and if one every did happen out of the blue, then I'm sure the business could eat the ~$100 cost that one time--it's still no comparison with credit card chargebacks.

When it comes to more expensive purchases in the thousands of dollars, then there are other ways to ensure you don't get cheated, such as waiting for a few confirmations, or even simply asking the purchaser for their identification. Car dealerships allow you to drive off with their cars for test drives, don't they? They feel safe doing so because they know who you are before you take it--the same can be done with other purchases.

Just throwing some ideas around.

I think it depends on the value of the transaction. 1 BTC transactions don't even require a fee. (I mean, 1 BTC per day or whatever is the calculation for fees.)

The business of waiting for 6 confirmations is silly. Even most bitcoiners have no conception of just how low the risk is of a double-spend. There is an excellent paper by Meni Rosenfeld that looks at the economics of double spending. Basically for any transaction worth less than some vast figure (US$ 100,000??) the risk is virtually zero because it would cost more to do the double spend than you would make by cheating. For everyday transactions, 1 confirmation is entirely sufficient. And as mentioned, there are ideas (which I think might be implemented in version 9 of the client) to allow for a quick double-spend check, so that zero confirmations would be required.

Also, the short-medium term future for btc is for online transactions where confirmations are not an issue anyway.

Dang and the last block took 45 minutes to mine. just my luck that I get stuck in the long block times lol

https://i.imgur.com/clbNz6r.png

Lol 51 and counting :P crazy

you can safely send 10 million no worries with BTC....no bank involved, not state actor, across borders, what else can do this....? and it might take 2 hours to confirm.....

The Mining Operating Margin is now -395% (According to Blockchain.info).

There's the off-chain solutions. Exchanges. Online wallets. Even game sites that allow transfers, like poker chips.

All of those are instant, and often times, mixed.

Or we could just use Bitcoin for both, which would be cheaper and easier.

Exactly as you said.
And once you go to buy a car/house - you can pay "first" (20-100%) than have a test drive/walkthrough and seller will than return you - if you don't buy.
Another - if you transfer $100K in BTC - it's once a life or 5x in a year - so you can wait another hour i think.
They see you account - can check/watch for double spend, they have 2IDs of you, your name, often personally knows you ...
At least in my country "changing owner of car - even if new" is like 2-4 hours in Police station, few weeks for houses ...

Another solution - online wallets OR o.w. combined with escrow - e.g. you can't withdraw for time limited (3 hours), but you "have" them. That time can seller ask to "lock"/freeze that amount - so you have them, can't use them - go to court ...

Bitcoin escrow can go down to 0.01% if properly programmed and much used.
There are basically no costs for "no problem" escrows.
Or better to fixed amount like $10 (which is nothing if you buying car or selling house) - no problem = no costs (if problem you pay something more or all costs - but it is worth it).

Just make a difference between "no important" transfers like $5 for Wallmart - and it takes a few minutes while u go to car, u can use the same account - which can be "verified for amount X" after Y+ buys and Z+ $ spended -- and between "life important" like $1mil transfer for you - but that's how often? And if - you can wait (as you would do by cash or bank) 1or 2 hours or even days  :P


LOL, ty  ;D

yes i am hoping that there will be better/more secure/highly adopted ways to use off-chain/instant/zero-confirm transactions and that will make bitcoin much more useful for everyone!!