Bitcoin Forum

Last blocks:
https://i.imgur.com/Y4ThTh0.png

sometimes it can take over an hour.

Also waiting on the next confirmations, getting a bit outrageous.
I got excited when the latest block came up then realised my transaction wasn't one out of the 1,400 confirmed.

Its the average of the last* 2016 blocks that count. Should that average result in 20 minutes the difficulty will be lowered.

*correction, its not actually checked every new block, so "the last 2016" is not correct.

No problem ... check graph here : http://btc.blockr.io/charts
the Avg seconds between blocks graph... min = 500 seconds - max = 640 seconds

There are some solutions being developed... People could help the process by testing the code. So if you want to help, one way is to start testing and reporting. Check out https://bitcoin.org/en/development (https://bitcoin.org/en/development)

Yes


No, because that would also make it easier to find a new block, thus it will happen more often. Did you buy that account or did you just not pay attention the last 6 month?

It's called variance, you can't beat it. This is why block times are so irregular at times.

Indeed, yet I feel OP has never heard of such a thing. I wonder how one can be active here over 6 month and not know about that.

How can the USD possibly survive in the real world if you have to wait an entire week to transfer money from one side of the country to the other side!?

atleast this guy gets it

i laugh that the OP cries that 313799 took soooo long. but did not shout out with excitement that 313798 only took 3 minutes or that 313796 only took 7 minutes.

doesnt he realise that before the last difficulty change, the average was way below 10 minutes. So this fortnight the difficulty has been ramped up soo high to make the average above 10 minutes, so that the average balances out to stay as close to 10 minutes as possible. but even with such a high difficulty, some blocks are still happening in under 10 minutes.

even as i write this, block 313806 took only 1 minute! 313808 took only 3 minutes

Not to mention the 10%+ transaction fees of fiat. 23 minute confirmation times to send money anywhere in the world? Well.....back to fiat I go!

I think OP means you can't wait an 60+ minutes for your payment to confim when you buy coffee, or shoes.... or anything were you stand in line at the counter.

Bitcoin retargets by the average timing of the last 2016 blocks. If the average is more than 10 minutes, the difficulty will be lowered if the average is less than 10 minutes, the difficulty will rise. It does not seem to be going to decrease however, look at https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty. They estimate the difficulty increase. Variance happens frequently so that is something we cannot avoid. At times, it can be faster and at times it can be slower.

if wire transfers of fiat take upto 3 business days just to appear in your account. and then upto 3 minutes to be confirmed against chargebacks.

bitcoin instantly appears in your wallet and takes an average of 10 minutes-an hour to b confirmed against chargebacks.

I think most transactions will take place as soon as the blockchain receives the transaction, and then merchants will process the payment as "complete" prior to waiting for 1 confirmation. Otherwise transactions could be "insured" in that there could be 3rd parties that you store bitcoins with to use for fast transactions. These parties will have known private keys from which they send bitcoins from. You will then login to the 3rd parties website, send the bitcoins from your account, which goes through their known public address to the merchant. The merchant then "trusts" the known public key/company, so if for whatever reason the transaction doesnt become confirmed, the merchant knows that the 3rd party will take care of the issue and resend the coins etc.

I think that will be the place of business for companies like visa/chase/mastercard etc in the future. Acting as 3rd parties to speed up transactions that are fast paced (store shopping, fast food etc).

this is where starbucks/PepsiCo will invent a webwallet for people to put in small junk change into (small daily spend) and do offchain transactions on. much like how visa works to solve the wire transfer delay.

so chill out guys when starbucks wants to accept bitcoin, the solution exists

What if we reduce block generation to 30 seconds

you are still going to get variance, plus the coins will be released 20x faster or so. But, maybe they could make it so a block is found every minute, but only paid the 25btc every 10 minutes, that would keep things on track. But, when I checked out the average block being found, it was just under 9 minutes, so that means that the difficulty should rise  about 10 percent next time.

Variance? Sounds suspicious. Like the search space isn't uniformly distributed enough. An average of 10 minutes can mean little variance or huge variance. Too much variance and it becomes difficult to rely on transaction times. If a transaction can take an hour sometimes, then that sucks.

I found this:

"In practice there is a sizeable randomness in how long it takes to validate a block – sometimes a new block is validated in just a minute or two, other times it may take 20 minutes or even longer. It’s straightforward to modify the Bitcoin protocol so that the time to validation is much more sharply peaked around ten minutes. Instead of solving a single puzzle, we can require that multiple puzzles be solved; with some careful design it is possible to considerably reduce the variance in the time to validate a block of transactions." -- http://www.michaelnielsen.org/ddi/how-the-bitcoin-protocol-actually-works/

Oh no how will bitcoin survive in the real world it takes 30 minutes to send money.


Banks only take 5760 minutes....

Something like this can be used for smaller transactions:

"... any Bitcoin transaction can be accepted with zero confirmations with a mathematically derived confidence level some refer to as “Transaction Confidence.” ...  Users have reported that the transaction confidence percentage reaches the high 90′s within seconds." -- http://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/news/the-mathematically-secure-way-to-accept-zero-confirmation-transactions/2014/02/13

There's nothing magical about credit or debt cards - in the former case someone is vouching that you're good for the money in the future, in the latter someone is confirming that you have the funds already.

There's also no intrinsic need to use fiat for this sort of transaction. It is irrelevant whether the medium used is USD, bitcoin, or seashells, as long as the merchant and bank both work in that medium.  At least with bitcoin you have the option of cutting out the middleman entirely.

Comparing credit cards to bitcoin is pointless, because the two are entirely different (and not at all mutually exclusive).

yea, as others have said better then i could, this is not a real problem.

though it sure will be nice when (hopefully) difficulty levels out somewhat...

Does it? I had one "stuck" there and I didnt even notice.


Within the same country maybe. International money transfer takes even longer.


Lets not talk about the fees


http://www.wikihow.com/Make-an-International-Wire-Transfer

I think 10 minutes is already too long to have to wait. One hour, that would be an awful long nervous time waiting.

I learned that with zero transaction fees the Bitcoin miners may not include the transaction at all! What happens then when using zero confirmations? Let's say that I buy a coffee at Starbucks with bitcoins and they use 0-confirmations, and I set the transaction fee to zero. Then I will get the coffee for free since no miner will include the transaction in the block chain. ;D

and this is why it's crazy to think that bitcoin will one day supplant paper currency. it's just not going to happen. this is only one of the reasons among many.

different day same post.  same responses.. dont like it anymore.. i will help you liquidate your crappy coin.

Stores operate with a risk anyway. The CreditCard you use could be stolen etc. Its easy to make a fee mandatory if you want coffee. Also: why would you use bitcoin to pay for coffee, yet it goes "to da moon" ?

I never understood this one coin fits all mentality. Maybe bitcoin will not be used for everyday payment, maybe it will replace gold as a store of value. Maybe it will mainly be used for international payments and thus for digital goods.
Also as it has allready been mentioned: you could just load your coffeestorecard with 0.005 BTC and get your 500 coffees with the card, etc. pp.

I read something about micropayment channels for Bitcoin. That could do the trick for shopping. And for bitcoin trading/investments, having to wait one hour like in worst case and 10 minutes on average is acceptable.

How is it not a real problem? 10 minute blocks are one of the problems to be solved in Bitcoin. If it wasn't a problem there wouldn't be so many people thinking of solutions.

It's clearly a problem. The question is how big of a problem is it? Is it enough to slow down adoption? Will there be solutions found or implemented? Or is it just a minor annoyance that doesn't matter in the modern financial world?

the people thinking of and trying solutions is exactly why it's not a "real" problem. key word there - real. it's an issue that's being actively solved and in my personal experience hasn't been an issue at all, honestly. and i've spent a lot of coin... bought giftcards via the gyft app regularly and get them instantly, without waiting for confirms, for example.

I think their bitcoin software could reject your payment using the mentioned 0 confirmation probability.  It would see there was no fee and not accept it as valid payment.  If it did happen to get confirmed then the payment would need to be return somehow back to your address.

This is called variance and it is a part of bitcoin, you can't change that. (Without chnging the POW algorythm to something different)

My experience has been quite a bit different. Sure there have been many easy transactions where my money was accepted instantly or near instantly. But I've lost count of how many 20 minute-1 hour++ delays I've had to sit at the computer watching blockchain.info waiting for the next block or two.

There are POS which can accept instant payments. They have methods to check and migrate double spending attacks. For example connecting to a well connected node, a typical double spend attempt and be detected within minutes. Also, you can have third party wallet services which helps you to hold your BTC and you can do offline offchain transactions to the merchants through that service. For example Coinbase.

Ok so its the fastest way to send any amount of money anywhere in the world and with a very low fee, but you can't actually buy as much things with btc as you can with fiat, and when you are converting btc to fiat thats where the fees will be! AND you are losing money as the btc price drops while you are waiting for your sell order to fill..

Not as ideal as they make it out to be..

Yes, when I buy something from a service that uses Coinbase or BitPay the transaction is fine. But otherwise it's generally not a great experience.