Bitcoin Forum

AND why?
Just 1 thing, for I it would be transaction times, cause waiting for those confirmations is wayy too long sometimes  :'(

The most critical in my opinion: Address the 1 MB blocksize limit to allow Bitcoin to scale.

I think that transaction time is a crictical issue that must be solved

I would remove the ability to complain about transaction times.


Bank transfer - > 3-4 days
Paypal - > 4-5 days
Western Union - > 30 minutes to drive and send $14 later also.
Western Union - > 20 minutes to go pick up.
Personal/Business check - > 3 days
Creidt Card Processor - > 1-5 days
Bitcoin - > 0-20 minutes

....

the 21 mio limit  :P

http://www.tfmetalsreport.com/sites/default/files/pictures/picture-404.jpg

Bitcoin ATM availability 8) 8)

Untraceability

BTC ATM's are popping up everywhere.  8)

I don't think transaction times are that much of an issue. I think people think they are but those usually haven't even sent bitcoins before.

I'm not sure what I'd change personally. Seems pretty solid to me at the moment.

1000-for-1 price split! 1 BTC = $0.50

I would like to see shorter confirmation time along with larger block capacity, without larger size. I haven't heard of a way to do the latter but I think if one was discovered it would be a major improvement.

As much as I'd like to see faster confirmations, the reality is that Bitcoin is primarily an internet currency and double spending isn't much of a risk for small value transactions such as a cup of coffee, but it would still be nice and help to address some complaints.

We are starting to run out of space in blocks though, especially since pools sometimes use lower than the recommended limit. Ideally, we'd find a way to store more transactions without increasing the block size.

I would fight to keep it at 1MB for the years to come. We need off-chain solutions for that and there are many in the works. Raising the block size would only slow down progress and harm those projects.



1minute is just as bad as 10minutes when in a supermarket, especially as this 1minute block time sometimes will also take 20minutes. We need other solutions to that and there are off-chain solutions.

But to answer the OP question:
What? I would add proof of stake.
Why? It's cheaper and better aligned with keeping the fees low and the network secure. With proof of stake there is no reason at all to have fees beyond keeping the blocks free of spam. Those holding bitcoins would have a huge incentive to keep the blockchain rolling even without block rewards and transaction fees. The claim that with proof of stake the rich become richer is based on the assumption that mining is a for profit venture but with mining (securing the transactions) being built back into every full client cause we can, we wouldn't have to worry about the 50%-pools and wouldn't be blamed for wasting energy on mining. Also those mining chip companies could focus on more meaningful stuff.
We could continue to give the block reward to proof of stake blocks and reserve the mining fees to proof of stake, aligned with the block reward halfing. At the next block reward halfing we don't half the block reward but we half the POW blocks, doubling the POW difficulty and adding POS.

Are there any decentralized and more importantly trustless solutions for off-chain transactions? If Bitcoin only works if you allow a third party to keep track of who owns it by storing balances in a database, then what is the point?

I'm not against off-chain transactions, in fact I think we need those solutions to be available, but they shouldn't be the only option that works. Bitcoin on-chain transactions need to be available and need to have reasonable fees. Keep in mind if we allow fees to get out of hand it will slow merchant adoption.

The blockchain

We could just address btc in terms of µbtc or millibtc

What about it and why??

Shitty gambling adverts from people's signatures. You do nothing to promote a positive all inclusive image of Bitcoin by pandering and trying to profit from others vices/addictions.

Sorry you werent clear enough. Would you like to ADD, IMPROVE or REMOVE this feature?  ::)

That's an easy one: transaction time, transaction time and transaction time.

Imagine if everything was the same except  your transactions confirmed instantly (or almost instantly). The transaction times are really the only problem I see with Bitcoin in it's current form.

I guess blockchain size as well, but that's not the main thing as most people are using online or light clients anyway.

Just because someone is a part of a signature campaign doesn't mean that they are only posting to promote said signature!

Personally, I am more turned off by people who put their Bitcoin and Litecoin addresses in their signature hoping for a handout  ::)

Bitcoin atms being easier to use, I don't want to slip in an id to purchase bitcoin.

I would probably change the fees so that even smaller amounts can be sent without large fees. If bitcoin gets more expensive, you could have to pay several dollars to send one dollar of bitcoin.

I would shorten the confirmation time. Ten minutes is a convenient number but there is no need for it to be so long. There are benefits to a shorter time. I would take a look at propagation times and the orphan block statistics of alt coins, and come up with a better shorter time.

Wish 0 confirmations are enought at more places, most places require confirmations, but they offer no service that cannot be canceled later (like before the goods are really send). It would be only bit more work to cancel the order if not paid later for them and zero risk...

I understand confirmation is really necessary for instant services only

A transaction doesn't have to appear in a block to be confirmed. (Although appearing in a block is a higher level of confirmation.) If the transaction is accepted by a suitable number of nodes in the network, which can happen in seconds, then it is likely it is valid. An exception to this is an online transaction, for which it is easier to mount a double-spend attack, but online transactions don't require instant confirmation, because the product is typically sent hours later.

Summary: The 10-minute block time is not too long, because at a brick-and-mortar location, the transaction does not need to be confirmed in a block.

I would change two things:

1 Lower fees to allow micro payments
2 Faster transaction times

To be clear...are you referring to improving one thing about Bitcoin the technology or the ecosystem in general?

From a tech perspective: Bitcoin core, blockchain and user interface comprehensive security measures
From a broader ecosystem perspective: Bitcoin Branding, Marketing, PR and Media Relations

It was fairly novel back in the day to be able to tip people who posted stuff that was helpful. There hadn't been a way to do that before. We take it for granted now, but, being set up to receive tips was kind of a way of identifying ones self as someone who was trying to be helpful...

More advertising

Your suggestion is to make radical change to the protocol of BTC. There are plenty of altcoins out there you can choose from as you suggested, pow and pos combined.

User friendly Multi-Sig transaction support in the clients.

Would help improve security in an inherently trustless system, with everything from escrow to locking down wallets.

Its gonna be this way until regulations relax :(

As in to spread the word about bitcoin further?

Fees can always be changed, but woiuld still have to be profitable for the miners. I could see this being a problem in the future. I think third party programs can allow for micropayments just fine.

The fees are there to protect the notwork from spam rather than actually being a reward for miners.

The total fees fro one day are in the average of 10-20 btc so miners are more inclined to find blocks with fewer transactions rather than missing them.
And in this mix a few guys spending 100$ daily just to bloat the blockain and you're going to see why we don't have 1 cent fees right now.


Good luck downloading the blockchain after two blocks if i'm gonna store there just a few of my hd movies.

I would try to lower confirmation times, they sometimes take hours :)

Although we can pay extra fee for faster confirmation, so yeah.

Sorry, I don't get people asking for faster confirmations. I understand it's sometimes frustrating to wait, but faster confirmation times = less secure confirmations. If you changed the block target to 5 mins, then services waiting for, say, 3 confirmations would simply require 6. No difference.

Fair point, in hindsight 10 minutes is nothing in the financial world of transaction times! :o

If the mining could be easier then profits would be more. However this might cause inflation..

There is a significant difference between 1 confirmation and 0 confirmations, regardless of the time. Reducing the confirmation time from 10 minutes is beneficial in any transaction delayed due to waiting for at least one confirmation.

I agree, this is the most important thing that will need to be changed sometime in the future, along with the max number of TX per second. I think both of these should not be changed until we see more blocks getting consistently close to the max block size and more periods of the network bumping up against the max number of TX per second as it is expensive for node operators to have that much bandwidth.

Have a built in exchange that allows for custom API configuration. If you can arbitrage trade right from your wallet, that could really help a lot of people out.

What do you mean by "easier"??? It doesn't matter how big the profit is, a higher number of Bitcoins as a block reward would mean that the price goes down accordingly. It's a self-balancing thing!

The is correct. The overall profitability of mining will always have the same target. If profitability gets to be too high (block time is less then 10 minutes) then the difficulty will rise, and if profitability gets too low (block time is greater then 10 minutes) then difficulty will fall. The per day/hour/week profitability will always stay the same.

Yes, i appreciate with you..time is important for all of us, so transaction times that must be solved.

I agree with transaction times. I know its a lot less than other payment providers, but those are impossible to reverse maliciously, other than chargebacks, which aren't present in bitcoin. Bitcoin you can easily double spend the minute you leave the restaurant after paying, while its still unconfirmed, and get your money back and free food, and the restaurant couldn't do anything about it. Also waiting around for 10+ minutes is simply not possible for bars or restaurants, because aint nobody got time fo dat. Also because of the block size limit, more blocks would increase scalability.

Sure!  Just unplug your miners, it will lower the difficulty for the rest of us!  ;D

The current system works perfectly and well, no major changes are required...

What if 10 million people decide to use bitcoin. Im sure the network would begin to struggle with massive amounts of transactions being made and size limits.

I think i want to mining setting, after 21.000.000 BTC mined. Bitcoin still can mined, but the reward is only 1 BTC / block  ;D

But then we become Doge, and our value will drop hard. Not a good idea to make it an inflationary currency.

Based on the rate of adoption and wallet creation, we might be at this level by the end of the year...

Which is another reason why Mutli Sig support in the clients would be a massive benefit. It will expand the possibly uses and help people have confidence in the system as both a sign of continuous development and also expanding the basic feature set..

That's already solved.

Not 100% true, anyone can be traced with the slightest clues left behind.

If I could change one thing, it would be confirmation times. 5-10 min/confirmation is too slow rate, specially doing high amount transactions.

Seems that almost all the bitcoin users in this thread agree to decrease the transaction times, and you can add me too of course :)

Yes could be improved but isnt necessary. Bank transfers take several days and international bank transfers can take weeks or months if you encounter a problem. So 5 minutes isnt that bad :)

The current system seems pretty perfect, even the confirmation times are not bad..10 mins , anyone can wait.

It seems perfect because not too many people are using it. Come a BIG influx of people and im sure we will see the problems arise.

A compressed full node
So that it doesn't take days to load the full blockchain client from scratch and by having more nodes taking less space have Bitcoin remain decentralized and accessible to all users.
Instead of the lightweight clients.

Mix into Monero and then mix back out again a using a different exchange. Hopefully the liquidlty will keep increasing to make this viable for larger and larger amounts of Bitcoin.

improve the security of bitcoind itself obviously

It is currently pretty secure if you use a well thought out passphrase encryption.

I would ban Luke-jr

Who the hell is luke-jr ???

An important yet controversial developer on the forums with a bit of an ego and a battle with a few members on here now and then.
In D@T and Github mostly so you don't see him to much unless your trying to change or alter some part of the Bitcoin Protocol with Gavin.
Usually around blockchain compression sidechains those sort of areas.
Or mining as ckolivas is pointing out  ;) Cough BFL

i think there should be a 2 or possibly 3 step verification?? or something. maybe something that is always instant that automatically pushes everything through into a temp ledger, then eventually after enough time goes by it gets pushed to a larger collection then finally get passed on as solved when the block is found.

no idea if tha tmakes it better but tx transactions are soo small it doesnt matter iw ould think.

Multi sig exists which is somewhat like that

^ I share this viewpoint.

But then I realized one factor that makes faster transaction times an actual improvement:  Once a bitcoin spend is actually confirmed in a block on the blockchain, this then prevents a double spend from occurring. So, the longer the block times (i.e. 10 minutes on average), the more opportunity for double spends. If block times were set to 60 seconds for example, then the potential criminal attemping to do a double spend would only have an average of 60 seconds to do so.

If it wasn't for this one factor then there would be no reason to speed up block times because what you said is true.

The question is: what is the optimal block time, and does changing this figure actually offer enough benefit to make the change worthwhile. It would be a huge fork. block rewards would have to change too because they would happen every minute instead of every 10 minutes. So instead of getting 25BTC per block, you'd get only 2.5 BTC per block. Honestly, this kind of change seems too drastic to occur to me. I accept bitcoin for how it is now, and just understand how the technology works so I don't get screwed over. Education is always going to be a part of using any digital currency.

there are two things important, but i would certainly reduce the transaction time, and the reason is obvious we live in a world that aim to make everything always faster, bitcoin is no exception

but not in all countries, there are still many who have not been there :)
example of my country as well not exist, the new plan would set up 2 pieces bitcoi ATM in the capital center :)

10 minutes are too long, I would modify the transaction time to 3-4 minutes.

The reason the block confirmation time is as long as it is now is because shorter confirmation times would mean there would be too many orphaned blocks and orphaned chains. Even if you had a 3 minute confirmation, having 4 of these confirmations would be much less secure then one 10 minute confirmation. Also for most smaller transactions, a 0/unconfirmed transaction is generally secure as long as it is properly propagated throughout the network and contains a sufficient TX fee.

But then most people would ask for at lest 3 or 4 confs. before accepting a transaction, so no big improvement.

What about shorter block times resulting in less time for double spends to occur? Isn't this an advantage? Once the transactions are confirmed in the blockchain, they are confirmed and no longer able to be double spent. Right? So, that would seem to be an advantage for a shorter block time.  (Even so, I am not advocating a change in the block times. I think Bitcoin is good enough the way it is. Leave shorter block times to alt coins.)

This would also make a 0/unconfirmed transaction much less secure. Now with the network hashrate as high as it is today it would take a lot of resources to mine the next block with any kind of certainty so the chances of a nefarious party mining to launch a double spend attack is low for most smaller to mid sized transactions as long as the TX fee is sufficient. However if the block time was less then the cost to potential reward ratio would be much greater for a potential attacker. 

would probably change the fees so that even smaller amounts can be sent without large fees. If bitcoin gets more expensive, you could have to pay several dollars to send one dollar of bitcoin.

Here is my suggestion:

Replace mining with DPOS, thereby relieving us of the need to inflate the coin supply at 10%/annum in order to pay for miners.

I want to be rewarded for holding an asset, not penalized with inflation. BTSX has got the right idea.

I would decrease the time for difficulty adjustments.  I don't have a specific duration in mind, but maybe something like every 1-3 days.

My reasoning for this is that I think it could have interesting effects on price stability due to reduced effects of difficulty manipulation and speculation by miners.  I think there's a likelihood that it could help stabilize the rate at which miners sell BTC to recoup investment costs.

For the record, I kind of have no idea what I'm talking about here.

Fees are optional.

I agree. It is even less than 20 minutes usually and they are still working to keep improving.

I don't think that the price is affected by the difficulty of mining but rather the opposite that the difficulty is affected by the price of bitcoin. If difficulty decreases or increases then the same amount of coins will still be mined on average. However if the price changes then the amount of funds that can be gained from using resources for mining would be changed in the same direction.

My improvement:

With a typical company, you *never* have the developers making *product* decisions.  There's a reason for that.  They have absolutely zero clue what the *market* needs.  With Bitcoin you've got a bunch of non product / sales / marketing people (also known as developers) making decisions on the direction of the software development.  

This is a huge problem.  These guys aren't economists.  Yet they're creating a potential new world economy.  These guys don't have the first clue what the market needs, aside from what they may have gleaned in conversations/articles/podcasts.  And its exactly why developers like Gavin seem to think its just fine to "add that feature later, when we need it" (faster transaction times).  

That's just one of many important enhancements that are on the "We'll get to it in 5 years" list.  The developers have reflected an inability to grasp the fact that the financial industry is evaluating bitcoin and what it can (can't) do *right now*, for products they would like to build "later".  If they see a limited protocol now, a huge opportunity is lost.  

This is one of the pitfalls of a project that is decentralized, and has zero product plan guiding its direction.  Product Development people shouldn't touch the code.  And Developers shouldn't be playing the role of Product Development.

-B-

The most critical in my opinion: Address the 1 MB blocksize limit to allow Bitcoin to scale.

In the majority of cases, waiting for confirmations is a waste of time. The difficulty in pulling off a double-spend is so convoluted and tricky, I don't think waiting for confirmations is worth it unless you're dealing with huge inter-bank or inter-business transfers. I've made purchases with Bitcoin about a dozen times now, and each time only took a few seconds. I think the longest transaction was about 7 seconds. Most were practically instantaneous.

Better anonymity and privacy tools/ protocols (I think these will come, though, just not there yet)

I wish blocks were 1 minute apart, not 10.

How transaction hashes get calculated. I would move "scriptPubKey" in a third section (i.e. aside "outputs") to exclude it from hashed data.

Compressing the blockchain would be nice, although I'm not sure how technically possible it would be.

This doesn't do anything useful you know.

Bump

Faster confirmation times do have benefits:

Many transactions are never confirmed for one reason or another. If I am selling something, I want to make sure that I will eventually get the bitcoins. If a transaction is confirmed once, then it is extremely likely to be confirmed many times, even if the first is orphaned. So one confirmation is fine for me even if confirmation times are short, and shorter confirmation times are more convenient.

Another benefit is a better distribution of block rewards. If there are more block rewards, then the chances of getting a block reward is higher. That reduces the need for mining pools.

Actually, the one thing I'm confident in asserting is that the relationship between price and difficulty is *NOT* a one-way function.  Price absolutely affects difficulty and vice-versa.   Anyone who tells you otherwise is completely ignoring psychological factors.

What I'm not confident about is exactly how this dynamic plays out, and specifically how miners (particularly the largest mining operations) are affected and influenced by varying difficult adjustment periods.

Also note that I'm not referring to how the actual difficulty level influences miners and the price, but rather I'm simply focusing on the time between difficulty adjustments.

Yes, the largest benefit to short confirmation times is that 1 confirmation is infinitely better than 0 confirmations.  As a result, very short confirmation times are hands-down better for convenience-store-like transactions (assuming that the time isn't so short that you end up with intolerably high rates of orphans, etc.).  Really, anything beyond 15-30 seconds becomes a legitimate issue for these transaction types.

No, this is incorrect. The block that contains the transaction could be orphaned. If block times are shorter, then it is more likely for a block to be orphaned, resulting in no difference in security.

Untraceability of funds and cloaking of transacting parties.

I think Bitcoin is most useful when it has cash-like properties, because then money will always flow smoothly. The current Bitcoin is at risk of being morphed into a surveillance nightmare which could also destroy its fungibility when things like blacklisting would be introduced.

ya.ya.yo!

The fee structure is inaccurate and needs to be fixed. 

It's not acute yet, as the primary cost of securing the network is borne by miners in exchange for block subsidies, but in the future we will need to pay miners for securing the network, and the current fee schedule is flatly wrong.  It is not charging for security in proportion to that which needs secured, and it will not pay miners to provide extra margins of security when those extra margins are needed. 

Right now we're charging fees based on transaction size.  Transaction size isn't what we're trying to secure, although under the 1MB block limit I suppose it is a resource we need to protect.  But what we're trying to secure is the value that the blockchain represents, and with tx fees not in any way based on the value to be protected we're leaving large transactions open to attack. 

Miners who don't get paid any more money to secure a block where a million-BTC transaction goes through won't make any extra effort to secure that block.  But attackers running a scam where they can temporarily rent mining power to compromise or undo that million-BTC transaction have an instant motivation directly in proportion to the value that is being secured. 

In fact when you consider the case of miners *as* potential attackers, this gets far worse.  Large transactions paying more to attackers but not defenders can switch the course of greatest profit from honest to dishonest use of the same resources. 

One confirmation is not better then 0/unconfirmed necessarily. If the confirmation time is too short then it would be very easy to attack the network and people would have a false sense of security when they see that a TX has n confirmations. When the block confirmation time is longer you will know that it will take more resources to double spend the TX (assuming there is a sufficient TX fee and the TX is well propagated)

Unintentional orphaned blocks would become more common, yes. But unintentionally orphaned blocks can't be used to double spend because you don't know when unintentionally orphaned blocks will occur, (and without resources you can't guarantee the new blocks contain your double spend transaction instead of the legitimate transaction).

But it would take resources to intentionally orphan the last block in order to double spend a transaction with 1 confirmation. It takes no resources to double spend a transaction with zero confirmations. So, there is some security improvement when you compare 0 confirmations and a longer block time, to 1 confirmation with a short block time.

I think this is nitpicking a little bit.  You're talking about a false sense of security from someone who assumes that 1 confirmation at an average of (for example) 30-second confirmation times provides the same level of security as 1 confirmation at an average of 10-minute confirmation times.  But, regardless of psychology, if you *had* to chose between 0 confirmations at n-second confirmation times or 1 confirmation at n-minus-m-second confirmation times, which would you pick?

The point is that one confirmation at any confirmation rate is preferable to 0 confirmations, and therefore *is* necessarily better.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=244656.0

I understand what you are saying.

But help me understand the Bitcoin protocol here. Let me know if I have some of this wrong:

The Bitcoin network is interconnected nodes that share unconfirmed transactions by broadcasting them among the nodes. A wallet application joins the network by connecting to one or more of these nodes. When BTC is sent from one wallet to another, it is sent through the network and the receiving wallet sees the transaction. A transaction must be verified by a node before it is sent to the next node. Part of this verification is a check to see if it duplicates an input from another transaction, either one in the blockchain or one in the unconfirmed pool.

Thus, it is difficult to double-spend because the transaction with a duplicate input would have to be introduced into the network before the 1st has propagated. Not only that, but the double-spend would only work if the recipient of the 2nd transaction was connected to a part of the network to which the 1st transaction hadn't been propagated.

Thus, to protect against a double-spend, the recipient only has to wait long enough for the transaction to propagate through most of the network. This is less time than the wait for the transaction to be confirmed in a block.

I would: make all coins of an address that has not been used for 10 years be moved to a void address.
This would force everyone to move their coins to a new address once that time limit was about to be reached, and so we would always know how many coins are "alive".

I would disagree. My point is that 1 confirmation on a ten minute block chain is more secure then 10 confirmations are on a 1 minute block chain. The reason for this is because of the higher number of orphans that will occur on a 1 minute block chain.

In order to successfully double spend a TX that is well propagated throughout the network and contains an appropriate TX fee you generally need to find the next block after the TX is sent (you could also find enough consecutive blocks after the TX is sent but this would be more expensive). If you have a 1 minute block time then it will take less resources to find the next block (it will also take less resources to find enough consecutive blocks to overcome the chain that confirmed your TX).

It would certainly be the restriction of transaction confirmation interval to one.

I think the present bitcoin system is pretty stable and working well. I have no problem with confirmation times either.

You're close. Bitcoin nodes relay new transactions to each other, but they don't necessarily (and don't usually) mine a new block when relaying new transactions. Until a new block is mined that includes a new transaction, (usually 10 minutes on average, but this varies)  it is not certian which transaction will be included in the blockchain (confirmed) and which transaction will be ignored*. Miner software has to decide which one to include. It is up to the miner to decide how to rectify this situation, and I'm not certain how off-the-shelf miner software typically handles it. I've asked in this thread here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=758658.0



*And even when a new block is mined that includes your transaction, there is a small chance (if other miners quickly mine two blocks in a row without your transaction) that this block may be replaced by another block that doesn't include your transaction.

Any more opinions - bump

This is not 100% true. However it is true most of the time. In order for someone to get around this they would need to have access to mining resources that would include a block in it's found block that would double spend a TX prior to an unconfirmed TX being confirmed. For most smaller to medium sized transactions this risk would be pretty small.

It would be my holdings  ;D

Why is that an issue?:P Or is that cause you want it to be double that, litecoinguy?:D

Improve the architecture, use Zero-knowledge proofs so that you only need the headers plus the latest ZKP to know that it is a full valid chain, and then you'd only need the UTXO set to know your balance and spend your coins. And the headers would contain a Merkle tree hash of the current UTXO set in each block so you can directly see which known UTXO's have been spent even without needing to see the actual transactions, you just need them for incoming transactions to you.

I would add the ability to store data in the blockchain, such as music, text files and others, displacing the data across the networks computers.

LOL Don't you think a block chain filled with music files would be a problem? Think about it.

XD Perhaps. Maybe exclude the music files, and limit it to data like texts, and size-limited apps. Could also be used for things like date specific confirmations that require proof that such and such was done on X day. ;D

Maybe a separate peer-to-peer file sharing system would work better. That way every person wouldn't have to maintain a copy of every file. We could name it "bit-something", maybe "bit torrent". I like that name. Let's make it.

But it's a completely different issue to talk about 1 confirmation on a ten-minute avg. block time vs. 10 confirmations on a one-minute avg. block time than it is to talk about 0 confirmations on a ten-minute avg. block time vs. 1 confirmation on a one-minute avg. block time.

Again, the point I'm getting at is simply about the importance of the very first confirmation.  No matter how you spin it, 1 confirmation regardless of the avg. block time is infinitely better than 0 confirmations at any avg. block time.

There's a huge difference between the two scenarios, and while you can debate (and be correct) about the false sense of security provided by confirmations with rapid avg. block times, it's undeniable that 1 confirmation is always better than 0.  Always.

I would like to see some improvements in security and scam prevention, I know it's almost impossible but I wish there was some way to catch people who take bitcoins and run away like all the website scams (wallets/mining) etc.

If you willingly give your money to an anonymous stranger somewhere on the planet, then there is nothing that Bitcoin can ever do to get it back.

I think a better solution would be more consumer education as to how to employ common sense to protect your money. People are very much used to the consumer protections associated with credit cards and are not used to having to protect themselves against scams like this.

I would change the bitcoin core wallet and modify it to work like a lightweight client (electrum - armory etc).

I think they are fine, unless you do too many deals/transactions per day..

Works well for me, I am good with it.

Well thats coming from, most likely, a personal (consumer) user. From a business point of view it would be much harder to use due to these time frames.

My answer is very simple,I would add an actual demand for it. Right now it is not in demand, it has no demand and from what i can see the developers have nothing in mind to create a demand for it, so its value rests in the simplest form ----> whos buying and whos selling and the stronger side decides its value. At the present moment the sellers are winning as the value is only 478 dollars a coin.

Definitely has to be the transaction time. That is really a pain and needs to be solved in my opinion as it leaves you with a long wait for confirmations. Having better transaction times might make way for people wanting to get into using bitcoin who are quite impatient and don't want to be waiting for confirmations.

It would be nice to be able to remove the transparency of the Blockchain from time to time.  Some more options to have anonymity is always nice this day in age.  I'm not sure it would prove to be a great decision but with privacy issues the way they are these days I'm not against at least having more options to protect and secure data and transactions. 

I think as a whole it would help with cleaning up the Alt scene of new coins claiming to be anonymous and not really offering anything of value to the market.  More quality of Bitcoin is less quantity of pump and dump alt coins if you ask me.  I understand this would have a upside and downside but I think it's worth implementing.

Please give an example, because I don't see a problem.

I have spent bitcoin in 2 places: Overstock.com and Ocean Blue Sushi.

On Overstock.com, I checked out with Bitcoin, paid, and received my shipment in a few days. PayPal would not have been any faster.

At the restaurant, I asked to pay with bitcoin after the meal. The waitress brought a tablet device with a Bitcoin address and an amount (after I entered the tip amount). I paid with my mobile app (Mycelium), and after a few seconds she said: "Thank you for your payment."

In both the web and the brick-and-mortar cases, I didn't wait. I paid, and went on my way. What is the problem we are trying to solve here?