I know Bitcoin is not designed for micropayments. But also knowing almost instant secure transactions are possible with Bitcoin I wonder what would happen to Bitcoin network if people would start using bitcoins for micropayments? Could it still scale or would it become unusable? Maybe transaction fees would raise accordingly and made it unusable for micropayments?

Is anyone working on implementing fast transactions with double-spend attack detection as proposed by Satoshi?

Utilize a 'listening' period prior to rendering the service or good. This has yet to be formally implemented in the standard Bitcoin client, but would allow a vendor to receive the transaction and then monitor the Bitcoin network for a certain period of time (maybe 10 seconds) for possible double spends. Vendors might utilize specialized payment processors with multiple well-connected nodes for this purpose. As explained by Satoshi, the network nodes only accept the first version of a transaction they receive to incorporate into the block they're trying to generate. When you broadcast a transaction, if someone else broadcasts a double-spend at the same time, it's a race to propagate to the most nodes first. If one has a slight head start, it'll geometrically spread through the network faster and get most of the nodes. Therefore, the longer the listening period goes without a double spend attempt, the far less likely a double-spend attempt will actually succeed. If a double-spend is detected, the vendor is notified: no latte.

Myth: Point of sale with bitcoins isn't possible because of the 10 minute wait for confirmation

Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa - the BRICS group of fastest growing economies - signed an agreement to use their own currencies instead of the predominant US dollar in issuing credit or grants to each other. BRICS economies hold 40 percent of the world's currency reserves, the majority of which is still in US dollars. More ...

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Hello everyone. This is my first post here. I'm testing how Bitcoin works and maybe getting to know some people in the process.

What does one have to do to earn 0.01 BTC around here?

To give you some idea of what I'm looking for: I work in tech support and do some web development / programming on a side. But honestly it can be completely unrelated to that, I'm just looking for something that doesn't take much time, even if it is something silly.

You can send the requests here or to my email address: max.bloomquist@gmail.com. I will mark this thread as "[CLOSED]" when I will accept the job. My Bitcoin address is: 13974Df1nXjqtQdKETHopgewbgffrcoFFF