Bitcoin Forum

Time for a FIX.

Are you kidding? A transfer takes less than a second...

I'm gonna need about 10 minutes to confirm your post.

...And give me 0.0001 BTC, too.

He said transfers not confirmations. There's a huge difference....

posting a cheque my mail - maybe next day to deliver - 3-5 business days to clear
wire transfer - 3-5 days in america
cash - instant, although ATM's have daily limits for larger amount

bitcoin - receive instantly - clears in 10 minutes if you pay a greedy mining pool

the fix for bitcoin if you are talking about greedy mining pools delaying confirmations is to stop them taxing bitcoins with 5c fee's that not many people want to pay. if it were 0.5c maximum, people would pay.

i hope not to see a reply that fe's prevent spam. as that idea is stupid. blocks are only 10% filled on average. and bitcoin can code different rules such as a 3 confirm requirement between spends. this would make it so spammers cant fill up every block.. just every third block.

after all we are suppose to be allowing microtransactions, not preventing them. so that news media subscriptions, vending machines and small priced products can be bought, advertising commissions can be transferred instantly in small amounts instead of accumulated to send in batches. all without a 5c fee being added.

I've never had a transaction confirm in 10 minutes. What's the quickest time one will take to fully confirm?

Define "fully confirm"...

Anyone who states bitcoin is too slow is either lying, or ignorant.

You know, be able to spend the coins you receive.

I wonder something...

How does mining difficulty affect transaction speed ?

I've spent coins within 1 second of receiving them where the transaction that I received them in had 0 confirmations.  Due to the transaction malleability issue, this won't always work, but it typically does.

Once a transaction has a single confirmation, it can be reliably spent 99+% of the time.

If you are unable to do so, then that is a limitation that the wallet you've chosen to use is placing on you.  It is not a limitation of the bitcoin protocol.

(Note, there is an exception for newly mined bitcoins.  Those are required by the protocol to have 100 confirmations before you can spend them)

Mining difficulty adjusts automatically every 2016 blocks to try to keep the confirmation speed close to 10 minutes per additional confirmation after the first confirmation.

The difficulty has no direct effect on transaction speed.  Transaction speed directly depends entirely on how well connected your wallet (and your recipient's wallet) is to the rest of the network, what the internet bandwidth is of the peers, and whether your transaction has extremely small outputs.

Technically a fully confirmed transaction has 6 confirmations ...

Up to 6 confirmations there are several documented attack vectors that can be used against it....

It just hasnt happened because the cost of doing so, is astronomically high.

Much like anything in computer security, it all can be hacked, but time & cost make many attacks not worth it.

Yeah, transaction broadcast speed is quite amazing actually.

Technically, there is no such thing as "fully confirmed".  6 confirmations is a "rule of thumb", than many wallets have chosen to implement.  There are other wallets that require other numbers of confirmations.  There is nothing about 6 confirmations that makes it more special than 5 confirmations or 7 confirmations.


Any attack vector that works against 5 confirmations, also works against 6 confirmations (it just costs more and requires more hardware).


So, then, what does "fully confirmed" mean?

Interesting. I'll try it next time. I thought coins had to be full confirmed before they could be spent.

If you can name a place that gives you goods and services before your payment is confirmed, please let me know so I can begin scamming them for being dumb.

I also wonder, how does the priority system work ?

I know that it is related to the localisation. What about the amount of fees ?

Would it be possible to specialize miners or a pool to confirm specific transactions in priority ?

10 minute per confirm is too long when exchanges require 3-6+

It has nothing to do with patience, but everything to do with time is money.

That's the exchanges fault for making them rules.

The number of confirmations required depends on the wallet you are using.

Some wallets require 1 confirmation.  Some wallets require 3 confirmations. Some wallets require 6 confirmations.

The phrase "full confirmed" is a "rule of thumb" for people who don't understand the protocol.  To protect them from their lack of knowledge, the creators of early wallets built in a concept of a transaction not being displayed as "completely confirmed" until it has 6 confirmations.  This is a user interface implementation and not a rule of the protocol.

Creators of later wallets reduced the number of confirmations they required.

I personally do many exchanges without waiting for confirmations.  It all depends on the trust relationship between the sender and the receiver.  If I know where you live, and/or where you work, and/or who many of your friends or family are, I'll happily sell you stuff in exchange for 0 confirmation bitcoin transactions.  If you scam me, I WILL come collect what is mine.

this problem becomes painfully clear when there's a breaking news coming out, when I need to transfer coins to an exchange and sell, after all my LTCs had been sold my BTCs were still waiting for confirmations. This happened several times.

The altcoin naysayers would tell you that 6 confirmations of LTC is less secure than 6 BTC confirmations, the fact of the matter is, on virtually all exchanges, depositing LTC is much faster than BTC. That's a fact.


 

In case you guys don't know, it take 48 hours to confirm a VISA card transaction. It doesn't even confirm on week-end.

Basically everything you buy with a debit/credit card let you buy before the confirmation of transaction.

Paypal takes 6 months to confirm as do credit cards - they can reverse the payment anytime up to 6 months later (hence exchanges don't accept paypal or credit cards)
A bank transfer is not instant.

Your complaint is that exchanges are not willing to accept immediate transfer of funds of Bitcoins even though it's vastly quicker than every other mechanism?

Stop feeding the troll...
None of you guys noticed OP's signature?
He's just an altcoin-shill..

www.humblebundle.com using coinbase.
Good luck with your scamming.

And you don't think EVEYONE else using those coins has the same problem? If it was faster, you'd be just as far behind.

So why are you selling your LTC if they are so marvelous?

These posts neglect the fact that if you're using Coinbase/VISA, your identity is already registered with these entities. If you try to fleece them you get got.

If I walked into a cafe where nobody knows me, got a coffee, and sent some BTC using a personal wallet - don't you think the owner would want to wait for confirmation before letting me leave? Wouldn't I have to wait at the door for 10 minutes awkwardly holding my coffee?

That's the point I'm trying to make.

The link in his sig doesn't even work lol.

OP, how is does your anus feel after the BlackCoin crash ?

Isn't it too damn painful ?

Do you regret not having Bitcoins instead ?

You don't need to register with coinbase - they just provide the checkout service. You can send Bitcoins from any wallet.

If it was my cafe?  No.

But I'd have a security camera, and a log of fraudulent transactions with timestamps.  I'd refuse service to you, and possibly press charges against you for fraud/theft if you ever returned to my shop.

No. 

Once a transaction is in the network (less than a few seconds - usually less than a second it will have reached a vast majority of the network, if not all of it), with a fee and no other problems, it will confirm and a double spend would be rejected by the majority (or all) of the network. Plus the cafe operator would likely be informed of the attempted double-spend.  And for a cup of coffee, the cost of a double spend (if even possible) and other attacks would far out-weigh the reward.

The repeated "bitcoin transfers are too slow" comments are from people who either are uninformed about the bitcoin network or are purposefully trolling.  There are hundreds of threads discussing why this is a misconception.  (Plus as others have said, there would likely be video evidence of who you are in the store so if you tried to steal the coffee, the police would get involved).

There go my hopes of becoming a coffee bandit.

lol, it's called trade.
I sell, I buy.
I sell because I want to buy them back later.

Agreed.  But there is still the issue at hand.  There are other coins that fly past confirms very very fast.

Yes, exactly

Lol. Don't tempt fate or BTC might come crashing down for whatever reason.

 ;D

I'm a trader.  Price usually isn't an issue as I enter and exit constantly to accumulate.  On the note of Blackcoin though, it is up 50x + since launch and holding strong ground after an understandable sell off after reach such high ground quickly.

Yes.  We love Bitcoin and want it to stay strong.

actually bitcoin is designed to not necessarily need confirmations to be safe. However, because of some disagreements between mining pools it is pretty easy to consistently 'doublespend' 0-confirmation transaction. This could become a problem for physical stores. As 10 minutes is a long time to confirm something in a store.

My point is that you are trolling us with slow transactions.

well, then the exchanges could choose to wait for just 2 bitcoin confirmation, as 2 bitcoin confirmations are about as secure as 6 litecoin confirmations.

Sure satoshi could have chosen to build in 5 second confirmation times. But the problem would be that due to connectivity issues miners will quickly disagree about which block came first, and forks wll be common. So the hashing power will be split between many different blockchains and the network will become much less secure and doublespends would be all over the place because a single bitcoin exists in multiple versions of the blockchain. That's why satoshi chose for a safe 10 minutes, so that miners would have enough time to communicate, even in case of a temporarily connection issue, and agree on which transaction was first.

Also, bitcoin is designed to work even with 0-confirmations  (proof) (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=423.msg3819#msg3819), however at the moment there is a bit of a problem with 0 confirmations, because some miners reject some transactions which other miners do pick up. So if you purposefully create a transaction that for some reason gets rejected by a large amount of pools, but gets accepted by other pools, while shortly afterwards making a transaction that gets accepted by all pools, you can get a 0-confirmation doublespend. Instead of complaining about the long confirmation time, we should find a way to make sure the 0-confirmation transactions become more secure.

of course stores could probably bypass it by having payment requests that do not accept being tampered with, to ensure that the payment gets accepted by all miners. This alone would ensure that doublespends are very unlikely even without any confirmations.

I've had a transaction confirm in less time than it takes to refresh my page.

What I can see, the confirmation times dropped around 2 minutes last few days https://blockchain.info/charts/avg-confirmation-time Is this the answer - https://eprint.iacr.org/2013/881.pdf  ?

A merchant can already look at the transaction and see if the sender has sent a transaction that will be rejected by a large percentage of the mining hashpower.  If not, then they have nothing to worry about.  If so, they can monitor the transaction received by the largest mining pools and see if any competing transactions have been sent.  If not, then they they can explain to the customer, "Due to your poor choice of wallet software, you have sent a high-risk transaction and must either provide identifying information or wait a few minutes before you can leave with your merchandise. To avoid this inconvenience in the future, please choose well designed wallet software."  If so, they can grab the payer by the arm and call the cops.  This can all happen with well written software within a fraction of a second (in other words, before they actually allow the customer to take possession of the products and leave the store).

so with only a very small amount of effort 0-confirmation transactions are therefore safe enough then.

For groceries, maybe the stores can change to online order and pickup method

For food, you can pay when you ordered, and by the time your food is served there'll be already a confirmation, or they'll just ask you to pay again if the tx got 'bounced'

We can just change our ways, digital currency should not be entirely used like paper currency.

I didn't read the paper linked but looking at the graph avg confirmation time started to decrease when bitcoin core 0.9 has been released. I hadn't time to check but it could be that block size has been increased in 0.9

wire transfers take 3-5 days in most countries. yet visa/mastercard which is a layer above FIAT aid in this process by ensring the transaction occurs and allows pople to leave starbucks as soon as they have made the transaction request.

what will happen is that starbucks will have a membership card that is a starbucks controlld walet. people deposit funds in at the start of th week/month. and then when walking into the shop they simply give the permission to allow starbucks to take out X amount of pre confirmed btc to cover the cost of the coffee.

there will be many services for microtransactions that have wallets for pocket money amounts to be preconfirmed to. and then merchants can simply take funds out in batches whenever they please

Wire is not same as ACH, wire can take minutes.

= not every country takes minutes

Yeah I'm not arguing with what you said, just adding information. RELAX.  ;D

Yeah probably, unless they somehow make another payment somehow simultaneously.

Cash is not instant because you have to have it checked at a bank if you deal with a stranger

The fee is necessary to keep BTC going when mining reward drops

For microtransactions altcoins like DOGE are the better choice

Really for most online purchases BTC is just fine but if you just wanna order a hamburger at Mcdonalds, that's just spamming the blockchain

lol, there is no way to fix. maybe a new block chain is easier

no, no new blockchain, different blockchains for different purposes

would you say, gold coins are bad because it is not practical to buy a cup of coffee with them? no, you would use a silver or copper coin and use the gold coins to buy a TV or something like that.

you would ALSO certainly not bring a heavy bag full of silver coins to buy a TV

BTC will be just fine with such an arrangement simply because BTC is the "store of value" blockchain and the other coins are just used temporarily

Noted, thanks for the information.

But my transaction is really slow,, maybe I need to check the internet

every new block gets generated in 10 mins. you get 1 confirmation per block. so if you are lucky, you get 1 confirmation in less than 10 mins. this is the biggest hurdle of mass implementing bitcoin payment over the counter because you can't get instantaneous results.

once this problem is solved, you will see bitcoin implementation surge. i hope we will all live to see that day.

Compared to other ways of transferring money, Bitcoin is very fast.
Please note that a transfer and confirmation aren't the same.
A transfer is usually instant.

confirmations speed is biggest wakeness of BTC.
even LTC has it was faster

I made a national bank transfer on Saturday. The money has still not arrived at the target bank account. What the actual fuck.

bought some unity3d assets this weekend. paid via paypal. took me a few seconds. then later the evening i bought two movies on itunes. paid with credit card. took me a few seconds.

tell me more about your revolutionary bitcoin technology thingie.

Certainly.

• Neither of those payments have confirmed yet, therefore both of those payments are still reversible.
• Both of those payments involved significant transaction fees for the recipient.
• Both of those payments require you to give up identifying information to a third party to use them, which puts you at risk of identity theft.
• Both of those are payment systems that rely on an underlying currency (and therefore theoretically would work with bitcoin as well), neither is a currency itself.
• Both of those payments involved an underlying currency that has an unpredictable inflation of supply.
• Both of those payments required both you and the merchant to have a contract with the payment provider in order to participate, putting you both at the mercy of the whims of the payment provider.
• Both of those payments required you to turn over control of your money to a third party, where it can be seized, frozen, or confiscated

that is very interdasting. anything of interest in there for average joes like me or is it again only about the the zombie apocalypse and the other stuff bitcoiners use to write on the internet?

This isn't a weakness. You're actually wrong.
The confirmation time is okay imo.

Seriously your one of those people who say I'm right cause this is how he said it. You and everyone else knows what OP means so get off your high horse.

Credit card transactions can take days to be confirmed.....

The problem is that when trolls complain, they don't make the effort to compare the same f---ing thing.

How long does it take for a credit card (or debit) transaction to become irreversible for the merchant?
How long does it take for a PayPal transaction to become irreversible for the merchant?
How long does it take for an ACH transfer to become irreversible for the merchant?

When compared to these common forms of electronic payment, Bitcoin is not SLOW.  Bitcoin is actually quite FAST.

Even FedWire (which is nearly instantaneous once the transaction is actually put on the wire) can take more than 24 hours from when the user contacts their bank until the merchant receives confirmation from their bank that the payment is received.

EDIT:  It appears that the troll has deleted the post that I responded to.

You're beating a dead horse.

A. My post isn't trolling in the slightest.  Now drop it.

B. BTC is slow.  Your guy's arguing is as if you were trying to convince an eskimo his ice was hot.

C. I don't even need to explain myself.  Everyone knows what I'm talking about.  

D. The goal isn't to hurt bitcoin.  It is to bring out the people who can apply the fix before things get out of hand causing then all sorts of people to come out of the woodwork.

You guys that wish to squabble feel free.  I said what needed to be said and that is it.

Cheers.

If a couple seconds is slow, I can't imagine what fast would be...

OP, congrats this is a new topic never discussed before.  ;)


Yes, from start to final confirmation BTC is REALLY fast.
The challenge is finding ways to "let the customer leave the store" without needing to wait for several confirmations.

This I agree with.  And yet you seem to be continuously trying to revive the horse?


On this matter we disagree.


You first.


Define "slow"?  Define "not slow"?

Perhaps we are just using different definitions for the same words?


Actually, at 273.15 K, there is a lot of heat in that ice.  With the right equipment, you could extract that heat.  Regardless, this is more like trying to convince the Eskimo that his room temperature PB&J sandwich is not "cold".


I'm not sure about "everyone", there are probably some people in the world that will fall for your proclamations of speed deficiency, but yes most of us understand exactly what you are talking about and therefore are able to see that your proclamations are without merit.


There is nothing to fix.  Transactions will continue to take seconds, confirmations will continue to take on average 10 minutes each.  This isn't something in bitcoin that is going to change.  What "sorts of people" are you thinking might "come out of the woodwork"?


No squabbling.  Just correcting the mistakes so others can learn from the discussion.


Glad to hear it.  So you won't be bringing up this silly FUD anymore then, right?

Remember also that a credit card transfer seems fast, but it is only an insured promise of money. The actual transfer takes at least a day.

Just took a look at the OP posting history.  I hadn't realize he was just a shill for blackcoin & whitecoin.

Putting him on ignore, no need to take this any farther.

Payment processors, but I don't think waiting for several confirmations is needed. Don't you need to send them simultaneously to even attempt to double spend?

I find it to be very hit or miss. There are times when I have a transaction approved in minutes, other times it takes over an hour (and I always include a fee). I guess it depends on traffic at the time, and of course how many confirmations the receiving part requires (though there have been plenty of times where I've waited what seemed like ages for just a single confirmation).

If the standard fee is 0.0001, does anyone know if you say double that would it greatly speed up the processing?

Or sometimes even a week or two.
How can one say that BTC transfers are slow then?

BTC can still transfer like creditcard, there's coinbase where you can put your BTC there and merchants accepting BTC using coinbase can insta confirm your transactions, BUT just like paypal you're giving a third party control of your money.

Yesterday I wanted to trade some coins in localbitcoins.com. I was nervous to start with, as I had heard of the robberies happening there. Unfortunately, I had to wait for almost 2 hours, before the coins could be traded. Localbitcoins needs 3 confirmations to make the funds trade-enabled. It was such a frustrating wait.

Its not that slow for me as long as i pay the fee, my tx shows as high priority

Hope you're not going to sell them for Paypal haha. Have you sold them yet?

other altcoin are surely faster, this is the only thing that i like about them

This can be fixed with a Bitcoin sidechain where you have a separate blockchain that confirms in 10 seconds and the orphan mining problems isn't a big deal because most miners can simply mine bitcoin and than convert to a faster sidechain if they wish.

Alt's will become obsolete for the most part once sidechains are introduced.

Which ones? They might say they have faster confirmations, but Bitcoin is still instant.

2 hours for 3 confirmations? Doesn't sound right.

I'm not a merchant, so I don't care in the least.
For a consumer, the first two are effectively instant.

No one in their right mind would sell their coins for Paypal USD. I sold them to another guy who transferred the cash to my bank account. Paid a 5% commission to him though. Not a bad deal!

They are only effectively instant because the merchant it allowing you to walk off with the merchandise even though the transaction can be reversed.

The merchant can do the same thing with bitcoin, and generally do so with less risk. Some do exactly that.

Unfortunately, many merchants don't realize this.  Therefore this isn't a technical problem with bitcoin that needs to be fixed, it's an educational problem with the merchants who don't understand the risks they are taking with one form of payment (paypal and credit card), and overemphasize the risks they think they are avoiding with another form of payment (bitcoin).

There's plenty of people on localbitcoins who do.

+1
They are acting rationally. Merchants don't understand bitcoin and are hesitatant to expose themselves to any risks they hear about. The reality is that it is not cost effective for a criminal to crete a fake transaction for a small purchase. If I were selling a sailboat, then I would wait for full confirmation.

No, they do it with considerably more risk.
A credit card company knows who their customer is and where they live, and has verified that information.
Fraudulently claiming you didn't use your card when you actually did is a criminal offence, and there is a pretty good chance, in face to face transactions, that if investigated you would be found out.
Bitcoin is anonymous. Once you walk out the door with your product, the merchant has no way of tracing you.

No, it's still less risk with bitcoin since you can't fake or forge a transaction, nor reverse one.

Until it has been confirmed, yes you can reverse it, with a successful double-spend attack.

And do you have any reliable statistics about what percent of bitcoin transactions are currently reversed by successful double-spend attacks?

If not, I'll take your claims of "considerably more risk" with the same serious as I take most of the other FUD in this thread.

since farm mining is ON ... generation of block is hazardous.
for a same ammount with same fee, i have 15min or 40min for the 1 confirmation.

No, but we have seen it on a moderate scale at least twice, with GHash.io's attack on BetCoinDice and the recent malleability issues.


Just to be clear, my considerably more risk comment is not general Bitcoin FUD, it was in response to this:

The situation of a face-to-face transactions with the customer leaving with the goods and not waiting for a single confirmation.

And I think that is more risky that the equivalent credit card transaction, whether the store has confirmation from the CC company that the card is valid and can check customer ID to match it to the card. Even more so with chip-and-pin cards, whether the customer has to demonstrate that they have the 'private key' to the credit card.

Conversely, a Bitcoin transaction with a single confirmation is safer for the merchant than a credit card transaction.

To quote gmaxwell:

Not plenty of them, but around 6 or 7. One of them had more than 480 confirmed trades. I wonder how this was even possible. Is it possible to register on Paypal with a pre-paid VISA debit card?

farm mining? Do you mean pool mining or what?
That's crazy.