Bitcoin Forum

How can it be made faster?  lower difficulty+lower blockreward to get confirmations faster? 

In it's current state, it can't be used for something quick like a checkout line in a store.

Third party wallet systems are the most likely option for checkouts.

https://zipconf.com/

Integration with other services will come with time. Litecoin has significantly faster confirm times without need of a third-party service, fwiw.

bit-pay.com is already doing checkouts at thousands of physical stores.

In most brick and mortar stores, I don't think there's much of a problem with double spending. In order to pull it off, you'd have to immediately stop after buying your physical goods and try to whip up a new transaction--probably sending coins back to yourself--and somehow broadcast it louder to the network than the merchant's POS device. Chances are the timing will not work out in your favor. Zero confirmation transactions should be fine in most cases.

As austonst said, in most cases it's not necessary to wait for any confirmations, so transactions are nearly instantaneous.

Many stores accept or used to accept easy-to-fake personal checks without waiting weeks to see if they would actually clear, and many stores accept credit cards without waiting several months to see if the buyer is going to issue a chargeback :)

This.  Double spending is a possibility, but it's also very unlikely. 

If I pay a merchant with no fee attached, and then step outside the store and double spend the same coins with a large fee attached, then surely the second transaction would get into the chain first. Am I wrong?

Surely, no.  Possible, yes.

However, there are many places in the world where scamming a local store will quickly make all merchants in the area refuse to deal with you except possibly on a cash-in-hand basis.  And some won't even deal with you then as a matter of principle.  I know it sounds strange to those of you who hide in the crowds of cities, but us rural folk don't have the luxury of being dishonest and getting away with it.

As the bitcoin infrastructure grows, it will be adapted for individual transaction types.

The US dollar, for example, is named after a large silver coin. Those were impractical (sorry ron paul) and were eventually replaced with the paper/fiat/electronic/credit card system we have today.

It will take a few more years of developing fast-pay systems to adapt bitcoin for use in day-to-day transactions.

In the meantime, the more obvious uses for bitcoin are foreign currency exchange, tax evasion, money laundering, porn, etc., but this will change as more technologies are developed.

this has already been discussed to length in other threads.

people for slowcomfirm: bank transfers are slower. slow confirm makes bitcoin more secure, and reduces spam.
people for fastconfirm: creditcards are faster. fast confirm makes bitcoin more liquid, smooth.

Bitcoin is intended for backing transactions that need the high security and provable validity.

It's easy to make an international high-speed transaction payment processor that uses BTC as a backing currency. there have been several proposed schemes for this, and the good thing is: Bitcoin makes them all compatible. Moving from one micropayment system to another is nothing more than a Bitcoin transaction.

I'm working on a project to automate this, but for the supermarket there's no real reason not to print BTC-backed bills or make cash cards. Since these are about small amounts of money, they do not need the expensive security mechanism of the block chain. But should too much money pile up in them, they allow to withdraw directly in Bitcoin for storage in a safer place or international transactions.



Remember that Bitcoin is about the option to move funds globally or own them yourself. There's no need to do things that way all the time. It's just good to know that you can do it when it becomes necessary.