Bitcoin Forum

Today, while I was shopping, I surprisingly witnessed a young teen (around 16-17) who asked the supermarket cashier if the operators think of accepting cryptocurrencies nowadays that it's being a "thing", which is kinda unusual in my areas; I don't know about you, but Bitcoin isn't even in the threshold of being considered an investment where I live, let alone a currency. He got a negative response.

This made me thoughtful. What happens when you want to pay with Bitcoin where there's rush, say a long queue of people which happens to be the case pretty often at supermarkets? On-chain is definitely not an option as you want from the transaction to take few seconds, so the next customer can push their products up. However, Lightning can become such a hustle when you want to transfer the equivalent of 200-300 EUR. Just to think that an issue with routing or capacity occurs while others wait for you, scares me.

The only thing that comes to my mind is to accept unconfirmed transactions with disabled RBF. Now, whether the amount is decent to pay a miner half of it for double-spending is another thing to discuss. It's not ideal and I'm sure those few-seconds-interval cryptos will find their way to attract by taking advantage of this "unfortunately sounded" problem. 

Sending out wouldnt really be a problem but waiting for at least 1 confirmation does because making out the things get paid already via unconfirmed transaction would really be that risky for that business owner yet there's

always a tendency for double spend which i do agree that some altcoins do already solve out this kind of problem which im not really that surprised that adoption on terms of payment system would really be that still in

doubt because of this scenario.This would totally slow down the total operation or flow on times like this unlike with having fiat which you could simply give out then wait for the change.

This depends on your risk management.
Even if you only accept fiat, there's always the possibility that someone give you fake cash or pick up the good and run away from your shop.
I don't think accepting non-RBF unconfirmed transactions is much risky if there isn't a big amount of money involved.

There are money checkers that can detect fake cash. You should not even attempt it in a supermarket as there are cameras everywhere. Besides, not getting your transaction confirmed isn't necessarily done on purpose and even worse: You can't know if it's done on purpose. It's a function of the system.

Some of those mall, or human necessity services do not know how Crypto-currency, or are overwhelmingly scared to try it. There was a news of this guy in my location he owns a night club and some group of guys patronized him, and consumed huge amount of drink and they where insisting on paying with Bitcoin, what ever is it they did I am suspecting cancellation of transaction, the owner of the club who so an incoming transaction couldn't wait for confirmation before letting them off had a great loss because the crypto never reflected the gravity of this story has caused many to complete remove it from their thoughts

Bitcoin is used for crime and it'll scare a lot of people away from accepting bitcoin just like the teenager Op called out that got a negative response. Actions like the one stated in your story won't help the adoption of bitcoin globally. And they had the money in BTC but, they deceived the vendor because he can't wait and if they were allowed to wait they will order more drinks. I don't know the level of the Vendor in crypto but, he would have suggested that they sell the bitcoin to a vendor that will send fiat to his Bank account.

It depends... Does it still count if we use an indirect approach? If you're lucky enough to have a "functioning" BTCitcoin debit card, it'd be flawless.

That's true, but if the store owner offers it to recurring customers, then I think it's worth the risk.

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

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.

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.

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 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 ;D 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.

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 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.

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.

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:

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.  ;)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Younger people feel more attached to digital marvels of the world because they were growing up, having them around, and so there's no distinction between real and virtual for them. I'm glad someone's asking around about Bitcoin payments. It won't change anything immediately, but it can be a way of slowly showing that there's a demand for it and thus increasing a chance of one day getting a positive answer to such questions. But yes, there are technical difficulties with making it go through, unless we're talking about a system of custodial wallets being used both by customers and by merchants, and in that case it can basically work off-chain.

At present, according to my friends and I, we usually choose cryptocurrency payment in large transactions and cross-border transactions I don't think cryptocurrency has any advantages in micro payment. It can be said that it's not very convenient.

This is the reason that I have concluded long back itself that bitcoin is not for transaction but only for settlement. Unfortunately (and not sure unintentionally as well) Mr. Satoshi has designed bitcoin in way not suitable for day to day spending; here are the few proof for that:

1. Deflation: Gold is not in use for super market spending then why bitcoin?
2. 1 MB block: Segwit may go effective less in next few years which will emphasize that we should not try to spend bitcoin for unnecessary things but only for life's essentials. Because, it is an asset class.
3. 10 minutes block interval: It is not a concern when spending bitcoin once in a while.

Once the transaction is unconfirmed in the recipients wallet there will be no need for panic because definitely the transaction will be confirmed and verified. and on average it takes 10 minutes for a single transaction to get confirmed so depending on the number of transaction on the mempool  it could even be faster than most than fiat transfers

Bitcoin first solved the issue of double spending by sending all transaction to a network of volunteer miners who ensures each transaction is been spent by the real owner and the also that the spender has enough output to initiate a new input

Fiat too can pose it's own delay in transaction mostly due to poor internet access or unnecessary transaction delay. For in situation of long queues bitcoin could be a faster option

I personally  don't see the need to getting  on a hurry in making a transaction either by the sender or the receiver because if any mistake is observed it will cost more than it will pays and such mistakes in cryptocurrency are mostly not correctible,  so why the rush? The sender must be willing  to sacrifice the little patience needed and same as the receiver  must first confirm the reception before further endorsement,  considering the fiat system,  if a transaction  is not confirmed first there will not be any further procedure  to make a purchase and this traditional system is what we all have been using right from time even before bitcoin comes in place,  moreover this cryptocurrency is more far secured and faster than the fiat banking system,  so why the rush?   

well this is a problem that has been discussed for years, bitcoin needs to be very fast to be useful in a situation where the person wants to pay something and is in a hurry because there are more people in line to make payments, in my country for example in every corner has a long queue to make a payment and people complain a lot when someone else takes time to make payment, bitcoin would not be useful in that situation, it would just make people from my country be fighting each other

They must be small businesses. I know none that does it, although I only know two stores in my area country that do accept it, in general.  :D

We don't use gold as currency for lots of reasons other than deflation. For instance, it's not easily transferable, divisible, verifiable. On the other hand there are plenty of reasons why you should use Bitcoin; from those I mentioned to privacy, censorship-resistance, transparency and nearly zero-cost transactions.

This is false. I can create a transaction, even with RBF (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Replace_by_fee) disabled, and bribe miner(s) not to take it into consideration while it will appear in everyone's mempool.

right now, it is not practical to pay bitcoin if you are just paying few bucks for your item. but i can very well agree with what you gave as an example, cross-border transactions. in that case, you don't need third party to execute your transaction but you can do it on your own and even setting how much fee you will pay. if you are not in a hurry, you can pay at a minimal cost. whereas, if you use WU or any other remittance company, you will pay a hefty amount and it would take time before it will be received. now, if the other party knows how to deal with BTC, you can easily send it to him without interruption of 3rd party and no paperworks needed.
now, in the case of paying BTC during rush hour or of that sort, i don't know if it is practical because you still need to wait, depending on the merchant's requirement. i can understand if there is a different queue for crypto payment, which i can say that there won't be any line for most stores, which you can take advantage of.

Unless a better solution is found, off chain transaction is the only option over here. Or used a centralized service that will allow you to spend bitcoin instantly through offchain transaction. Like those bitcoin credit cards where you pay with bitcoin using your card and the merchant can opt to either receive in fiat or bitcoin.
No system is perfect yet. Right now if they want to use crypto currencies, they can use other altcoins that has almost instant confirmation time.
Fiat is used for crime too. Does it scare a lot of people away?

BTC isn't a feasible solution currently to your query op primarily due to the issues that you highlighted yourself. Altcoins like LTC, Doge etc are better solutions, but most people don't completely trust them.

This is why FIAT will always be the primary currency while popular cryptocurrencies like BTC, LTC etc could serve as feasible secondary options as long as people are willing to trust them.

Trust in such cryptocurrencies is slowly and steadily building up over time(Eg: Recent war led to many people relying on crypto instead of their local FIAT).

In a rush or in a long queue where people are waiting and some are probably even irritated already, nothing can defeat cash. Cash is the most efficient payment option if you are in a hurry. I have experienced this many times. It often irritates me when I'm in a hurry in the grocery store or in the department store and the person in front of me pays in card, either in debit or credit. It takes a while. They need to insert and reinsert the card, sometimes type and retype the PIN, issue a separate receipt, etc. If it were done with cash, it would be very quick.

BTC is feasible for many things. but whats not obvious to most is that the OP is trying to be subtle with hints of bitcoin being useless for daily use stuff(not his first carousal ride on his merry go round). so that he can subtly hint and suggest other altnets as solutions

recently (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5388511.msg59451977#msg59451977) he was trying to blame bitcoiners for not spending value to lobby governments to stop asking exchanges to perform KYC. even though a smarter person than him knows that the point of KYC is about tax, laundering, crime and terrorist prevention. which no government would decide to take a blind eye to and drop KYC. yet oops, it must be(in his view) bitcoiners fault why exchanges are asking for KYC due to lack of confidence in the bitcoin community having any desires of privacy. thus then advertising that people should move other to things like ethereum to then 'de-fi'
heck he was even trying to raise the anger into making people stop using exchanges which would cause a price crash on bitcoin.. how obvious is that .. too obvious.

he is trying many subtle and not so subtle ways to make people think bitcoin is not useful in peoples daily lives. and that manipulation has not gone un-noticed

i guarantee you within a couple weeks he will make another hypothetical scenario where he pretends that he found another flaw that can benefit from people using a different network
(he and his chums dont like it when i out their campaigns)

the game of advertising altnets has got so ramped up that even in this topic oeleo and blackhatcoiner are pretending to be opposing view points but subtly they are on the same side.. trying to hide their allegiances of an altnet

blackhatcoiner is just less subtle about his preference of altnets. at first i thought oeleo was maybe leaving his chum group and actually becoming a bitcoiner, but his subtle schemes have not been that convincing because he still advertises his favoured altnet as top of his list possible "solutions", pretending the altnet(in many topics) is bitcoin and there is no difference between using the altnet and using bitcoin.. (facepalm)


sorry but im sticking with bitcoin

They are instant because they are either centralized or insecure.

Neither Litecoin nor Dogecoin solve this issue.

The block times of these coins are 2.5 minutes and 1 minute respectively. This is till not fast enough for a point of sale transaction, which needs to be instant. Even 1 minute for a confirmation is too long for any retailer with a queue of a few people waiting. Further, a 1 minute confirmation time means a large increase in the number of stale blocks, which means waiting far longer than 1 minute anyway to ensure the block you are looking at isn't replaced for a competing block at the same height.

As I said above, the main solution is to either accept zero confirmation non-RBF transactions for small values or to use Lightning.

or stick with bitcoin. and instead:
a. accept zero-confirm non rbf
b.  buy one of his giftcards as you walk/drive to their store..
c.  deposit funds into an address of a merchant upfront,
d.  use multisig with merchant upfront and then sign off on a transaction with the merchant at the cashier desk.. that broadcasts
that way you cant RBF/double spend without their signature of any possible second spend you attempt

its the same idea as your altnet.. but without all the flaws.. yep actually performed on the blockchain instead of holding onto and not broadcasting unconfirmed transactions

yep your altnet is one step worse then zero confirm transactions. because they dont even broadcast the transaction that intends to give the merchant a utxo with value dedicated to them.. (adding in all the other flaws of the altnet that can hinder the possibility of the merchant ever getting his intended utxo value)

oh and even the altnet devs have lost value in their altnet more so than the complaints of broadcast zeroconfirms ever has

Exactly. You should neither accept 1 confirmation as a settled transaction, especially in Dogecoin; there are lots of stale blocks. The security of each confirmation drops when the block interval decreases. I find it justified to ask more than 10 confirmations if you're moving huge amounts.

Great, now combine this with payment channels, atomic and trustless multihop contracts in a peer-to-peer network and you've got Lightning! What you describe requires to make two on-chain transactions; one depositing my money on the multi-sig address and another withdrawing the change. I find it inefficient to transact once with two transactions.

Note that even 10 Dogecoin confirmations are not nearly as secure as a single Bitcoin confirmation given the far reduced hashrate of Dogecoin. If you are transacting an amount you would want to wait for 6 Bitcoin transactions for, then you should be waiting for several hundred Dogecoin confirmations.

I ignore franky1 in threads like these since he just repeats the same nonsense over and over, but this quote is actually hilarious. So his solution is to open a channel multi-sig wallet with the merchant ahead of time, and then after we have decided on how much money each of us is going to take out of that channel wallet, we broadcast a final settlement withdrawal transaction? What a revolutionary idea! What about, to make things even easier, we leave the channel wallet open between shopping trips, so we don't have to open a new one each time? Amazing!

We should come up a snappy name for this idea. I propose "Thunder".

I wonder how many other factors can be included into this. For instance, could we measure the decentralization of each hashrate to conclude how hard it'd be for an insider to perform a 51% attack? Or to go one step further and say, who the hell cares about Dogecoin?  :)

Lol. Why thunder, though? It takes more than an on-chain transaction. It doesn't happen instantly. The problem remains; the transaction isn't settled immediately. If only we could come up with a solution to this.  ::)

trustless? (pfft)*
yea combine that with not paying into the merchant direct(pftt)
but instead locking excessive funds up with some random person days before. then having to lock up more funds with another random person incase the first person is offline.
then having to switch off all the autopilot and public announcement defaults to hide from having your liquidity raided before you can spend it yourself..
and then have to plan which bunch of random people to hop through to hopefully find a link to the merchant you intend to use.
oh and then hope along this route none of them are *'turbo' faking channel balance.. to cause issues for you or the merchant

what you describe of having to have a few channels set up with more balance then needed locked up earlier then needed. and the HOPE that the merchant might be involved in the intricate web of hops when needed.. that is what i call inefficient.
heck even your altnet favoured devs have hit that wall hard, and said how the hop-route model is a both chicken and egg failure. it only works if enough idiots are conned into using the network, but then later fails again because everyone is then using the network leaching out the liquidity of possible paths.. thats why they are moving more in directions of the hub-spoke model of directly contracting with the merchants(albeit they still want to be MSB middlemen hubs inbetween ofcourse which has its own flaws)

as for finality/settlement..
especially when none of them are then broadcasting to confirm the payment to settle up. middlemen can then play games punishing each other in a chargeback scam game of fastest scammer wins.. along with all the rebalance games inbetween to empty out liquidity..

seriously. you seem to be stuck in the 2018 utopian glossy advert, and not actually done your research on how impractical your altnet is and how many ways it can be abused for people that just want to buy their lunch on a whim, without anything more then a 10 minute plan during lunchbreak.
(or maybe you do know how many ways it can be abused and thats your actual intent)

your altnet only works sometimes, if you are set up hours/days before hand with excessive funds pre-locked to increase chances of possible paths(still with no guarantees). and then even if you find a path there is no finality to the payment without the risks of middlemen meddling with the system

i prefer what bitcoin was designed for. paying the intended recipient without the silly meddle men 'hop-n-hope' games
(i purposefully spelled it meddle)

yea i know you dont like settling up and finalising. i know you prefer people to lock up and stay locked up so you can play games with their balance. but thats not bitcoin.

Yes. I like the entire process. I find it impressive.

May I assume you're referring to this (https://github.com/lightning/bolts/issues/565#issuecomment-460601680)? Is it yet implemented? As far as I can see, no. (And it's not going to be)

You're saying that Lightning is impractical while you're also suggesting to use a multi-sig between the buyer and the cashier. C'mon.

Well, guess what: Bitcoin, alone, cannot scale. It's inefficient. You don't have to state it 100 times that you want to buy a coffee, or to pay your Netflix subscription, or to pay your web hosting bills. And you know that's true, that's why you propose bigger blocks. Allow me to stop it right there as it becomes completely off-topic.

Maybe that is not down to you to define.

there is more to it than your propaganda.. but thanks for your admission that YOU think bitcoin doesnt work. but thats your opinion..
we know you dont like bitcoin. you made that obvious in many topics.

the capitalist politics of not allowing scaling is whats holding bitcoin back. scaling is not the issue, its the solution.. but again you dont want bitcoin scaling. because you prefer getting people to stop using bitcoin for daily use stuff

go on. admit it.
you started this topic pretending to want to know how to buy daily use stuff at a supermarket with bitcoin.. pretending that was your intent.. , but now you want to say bitcoin cant do that but your favoured other network can..