There are other methods to dealing with fast transactions, ie. fast food, restaurants, that could be adapted. As soon as a proper bitcoin credit union or bank appears, we'll see proper bitcoin debit cards. Or you could offer gift card sales online, that don't need the fast confirm time, like Gyft. Or you could be like starbucks and have a specific app or card that's balance loadable. There are ways around it that for most quick transaction businesses.
You don't have to have the protocol always adapt to the consumer. Just let PoS technology adapt to use bitcoin. Its already there, its just not widespread yet.
yes, absolutely the way to go with the current implementation thing is that it is not that sexy then - i.e. you rely on a product of a specific third party and have to trust them with your coins but still a good way to go for common people |
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Just to stress it out - I am not talking about changing properties of Bitcoin blockchain. I was talking of creating a second blockchain to work in paralel with Bitcoin but without introducing new coins.
a scond blockchain is a new coin. "coins" are not objects that sit on a blockchain.. the blockchain is the coin.. its just a ledger. imagine it like a book with entries wrote in it. the book is bitcoin. making a new book, is making a new coin.. hense my use of mentioning litecoin. swapping value between book 1 and book 2 is what exchanges do. so imagine you store your 100btc in bitcoin, and each day you move 0.1btc of value in exchange for.. well lets not use litecoin.. lets use another altcoin with 21mill cap, where coins are swapped 1for1. but this altcoin has a 2 minute blocktime. (the bank/credit card anology) you can even call this altcoin, bitcoin 2.0. but the point being, a separate ledger(blockchain) is a new coin I would disagree and my argument would be that this is a matter of terminology and definitions. It might look like a coin, it might work as a coin, but unless it can be used as a coin, I would not call it a coin. For example, we can guarantee, that people can not get any coins from this fast blockchain to their wallets. We can set miner revenue to 0, fees to 0 (but not zero the actual BTC fees). Then really if everyone has no coins, can you call it a coin? Maybe by "no coin, still coin", but from a practical point of view, I would not call it coin, just a technical tool to achieve something. |
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I just stumbled over this post while waiting for about 40 minutes now to get my $50 bitcoin transfer confirmed (just three confirmations needed, blockchain, go on, please, please...)
And this is not the first time I'm waiting. For me this clearly tells, that bitcoin isn't "ready for primetime" yet. It works well as a proof of concept, and beyond that. But imagine normal people doing normal daily payments with bitcoin. It's too slow, and besides that the whole blockchain mechanism certainly couldn't handle the amount of transactions if John Doe starts using bitcoin.
So the idea of having a merged second, considerably faster blockchain for small transactions seems quite useful to me. Perhaps you could even do multiple second chains somehow, to be able to handle enough transactions when usage keeps increasing.
And contrary to the proposed "just use another (Lite|Vert|Doge|Fast|whatever) coin" solution this mechanism should be included in the bitcoin wallet and be fully transparent to users. No mainstreet merchant will implement payment for 10 different coins or so. It should be just a on-click-bitcoin-payment and thats it.
Honestly, if you really tell people to use another coin, they will do exactly that in the long run. And there is no reason, why people should use bitcoin then at all. The "storage of wealth" argument is plainly wrong, as almost all other coins can be used for that, too. So people will store their assets in exactly the same coin they will use for daily payment. If on some day in the future this isn't bitcoin, it will get its place in history books as a nice proof of concept and will have no value any more.
Like the OP, I really think that bitcoin has a problem here. But as far as I can tell the big bitcoin buddys aren't interested in a solution (nor even in acknowleding the problem), though. We'll see, how this influences bitcoins future.
Just my 2 cent.
Partially agree, but there exist solutions today for fast Bitcoin payments. Just saw a video how normal people buying normal food from normal seller  using Bitcoins - they just scan QR code and that's it. Then I found this question on Stackoverflow that this is being done by relying just on existence of the transaction itself, without any confirmation. And that is "credit card fast". The thing is that the provider of this probably does accept a possibility of misuse and still goes OK since its fees are somehow good enough to cover those few cases. The seller is not in danger then and thus the whole concept is perfectly usable for common people. Alternatively, you can have various "prepaid" products that would work "credit card fast" too and without even having a danger of being misused. Of course the trade-off here is to stick with a particular entity on both buyer and seller side. And finally, Bitcoin is still extremely usable on the "bank to bank" level. Here you have oversees payments in matter of hours instead of 24hrs-10days banking system. So I do not thing that the super-fast feature is crucial, I just say I would be interested in it if it is implemented somehow. I would even took the risk of hard fork for this feature. But that is just only me of course |
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I am not really talking about litecoin, any other altcoin, new altcoin etc. Just Bitcoin with 2 different speed blockchains, the original one, very secure, "as is today"; and the faster one, for smaller transactions (up to 500 or 1000 USD) that would get 1 confirmation every 1 minute on average.
That would not provide any security. Just because the tx is confirmed in the "second blockchain" doesn't mean the attacker can't still double spend it in the "main blockchain". To enforce such requirement would mean a radical change of the Bitcoin protocol, and a change like this is simply not going to happen. OK, so you are saying that an answer to my question 1) is in fact NO - No, unless there are significant changes in the Bitcoin itself. |
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From what I learned recently, it seems that to create an unconfirmed transaction out of nothing is possible This is a false statement. Miners are not the only security mechanism in the Bitcoin network. All nodes (every single one of the 100,000+) on the network independently validate transactions before they include them in the memory pool or relay them. A transaction spending "nothing" would instantly be dropped by all peers on the network. You would never even see it in your client. It is very likely that your node wouldn't even see the tx to drop it, as every node between you and the sender dropped it and thus never relayed it on. As for changing Bitcoin target interval. In theory any change to Bitcoin is possible, as a practical matter it will never happen as it requires a consensus and a hard fork. It is unknown if a shorter interval will be optimal as the network, transactions volume, and block sizes gets larger. There is no free lunch. Shorter block interval means higher orphan rates. That means less effective security and the orphan cost rises. With a higher orphan cost miners will be reluctant to make blocks larger, tx fees will rise, and lower paying or free txs will wait much longer to be included in a block. Thanks DAT! That is very interesting that you say my initial claim is false. In my other topic that I opened some days ago, I had a reply that stated it's technically possible to create orders to send BTC from address that is empty of course that this is just an opinion of an anonymous gentleman, so nothing I could rely on, but since then I have been a witness of ASICMINER's dividend being paid from an empty address and it took like 24+ hours for a first confirmation for that transaction to appear and that was because the address was empty and it took a while until it was funded. This tells me that it was indeed possible to create a transaction spending BTC from address with not enough balance. Is this not the case that you are referring to? Bitcoin doesn't work on the concept of balances. All transactions in their input reference a specific unique unspent output (by tx id and index) on the network. That output either exists or it doesn't. If it doesn't the transaction is simply invalid. In other words, there had to be a chain of transactions that guaranteed that that address will be funded, otherwise that transaction would not be accepted by nodes. Is this right? Thank you! |
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Just to stress it out - I am not talking about changing properties of Bitcoin blockchain. I was talking of creating a second blockchain to work in paralel with Bitcoin but without introducing new coins. That could be mined simultaneously and thus guarantee the precise security as wanted (e.g. 10 % of Bitcoin's). I was more talking about crypto algorithms being used to ensure that if we spend something in the faster chain, we will see that transaction later in the slower chain.
I am not really talking about litecoin, any other altcoin, new altcoin etc. Just Bitcoin with 2 different speed blockchains, the original one, very secure, "as is today"; and the faster one, for smaller transactions (up to 500 or 1000 USD) that would get 1 confirmation every 1 minute on average.
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From what I learned recently, it seems that to create an unconfirmed transaction out of nothing is possible This is a false statement. Miners are not the only security mechanism in the Bitcoin network. All nodes (every single one of the 100,000+) on the network independently validate transactions before they include them in the memory pool or relay them. A transaction spending "nothing" would instantly be dropped by all peers on the network. You would never even see it in your client. It is very likely that your node wouldn't even see the tx to drop it, as every node between you and the sender dropped it and thus never relayed it on. As for changing Bitcoin target interval. In theory any change to Bitcoin is possible, as a practical matter it will never happen as it requires a consensus and a hard fork. It is unknown if a shorter interval will be optimal as the network, transactions volume, and block sizes gets larger. There is no free lunch. Shorter block interval means higher orphan rates. That means less effective security and the orphan cost rises. With a higher orphan cost miners will be reluctant to make blocks larger, tx fees will rise, and lower paying or free txs will wait much longer to be included in a block. Thanks DAT! That is very interesting that you say my initial claim is false. In my other topic that I opened some days ago, I had a reply that stated it's technically possible to create orders to send BTC from address that is empty of course that this is just an opinion of an anonymous gentleman, so nothing I could rely on, but since then I have been a witness of ASICMINER's dividend being paid from an empty address and it took like 24+ hours for a first confirmation for that transaction to appear and that was because the address was empty and it took a while until it was funded. This tells me that it was indeed possible to create a transaction spending BTC from address with not enough balance. Is this not the case that you are referring to? |
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for store of wealth stick with bitcoin. for fast transactions, lets get merchants using litecoin for faster confirm times.
imagine bitcoin as the bank account that does wire transfers slowly and litecoin as the credit card..
Thanks for reply, I am aware of Litecoin and other coins, but that was not really my question. It was more about "can we make Bitcoin faster just with some kind of second blockchain?" and "is this question interesting?". |
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Hi,
has there been a serious discussion on faster transactions in Bitcoin? Is a consensus that they are not needed or are there any technical problems that prevent this to be implemented?
What do I mean by faster transactions? From what I learned recently, it seems that to create an unconfirmed transaction out of nothing is possible and hence accepting any amount of payments with 0 confirmation is extremely risky. Rely on 1 confirmation seems to be OK for amounts under current block miner's revenue (say 25 BTC ~ 15000 USD), maybe the calculation should be made only a portion of a block revenue. Anyway, I stick with 15000 USD for this moment. 15000 USD sounds like a lot when we need something like 5 USD to confirm.
So, if we can confirm up to 15000 USD in 10 minutes, it might be interesting if we can confirm up to 1500 USD in 1 minute.
How to do that? We know that Namecoin can be mined simultaneously, so based on that knowledge I assume we can create a new blockchain similar to Bitcoin, with 10x faster block generation, meaning that we would accept as solution any hash that matches 10x smaller difficulty than Bitcoin's. But no new independent coins. We just use this new blockchain for confirmations of small transactions that we want to go faster. We can have a client that sends everything up to e.g. 1 BTC (600 USD now) using the faster chain.
Now my current knowledge of Bitcoin protocol does not allow me to go further in technical details on how to join faster chain coins with slower blockchain, but I believe this is just a technical and design obstacle that could be solved.
My questions:
1) To anyone with greater technical knowledge of Bitcoin protocol - is it really solvable as I believe or is there any super hard problem that would prevent that?
2) If this is possible and can be done, why is this not interesting? (I ask like that since I assume that if it was, someone would already came with that)
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Electrum is more secure than MultiBit as the MultiBit wallets are not encrypted. The next time try Electrum
How is wallet encryption related to this particular topic? |
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You mean donating option...? |
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Seems no longer an issue ... since the site is down
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The option is available in MtGox interface, but I was unable to proceed due to this error message: Merchant does not allow payments from anonymous users. Not sure what this is about since I am both MtGox and OKPAY verified user with long history and was logged in during the attempt to both systems. So, anyone able to deposit from OKPAY to MtGox? Thanks! |
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Just so I'm 100% clear on the development of this situation: 1. Over one year ago a (minor?) issue with the protocol was identified and some general information was added to the bitcoin wiki. http://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transaction_Malleability, a publicly viewable resource. 2. Engineers at Mt Gox, historically the most significant - and for a long time the largest - bitcoin exchange in the world, either were not aware of this information (on the public wiki? really), disregarded the issue, and/or failed to implement a solution on their end to prevent or at least monitor and warn of this kind of activity taking place between their backend and their customers. 3. An attacker or group(s) of attackers realize that a vulnerability exists with some exchanges, or, at least just Mt Gox. Presumably they "extract" some funds without Mt Gox realizing right away. 4. Mt Gox audits their wallet balances and finds a discrepancy. 5. Mt Gox continues its hold on withdrawals, until the issue, known for over 12 months, is resolved with great urgency by the devs. How very curious indeed! Seems so, more or less |
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Thank you all for the answers. For me personally, the most simple answer that cleared everything to me was this one: it's technically possible to create orders to send BTC from address that is empty As this is possible then the input and output security are equal. Further explanations are not necessary, but thank you for them too. |
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Every form of "thank you" is just good enough for me.
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Just looked at the blockchain, seems as if all divs for 2/5 have now been confirmed at least once. If you still do not have your div, well then there is some other issue then low fees and chained transactions.
yes, mine appeared in bitcoin-qt now |
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I am not sure this is a good time to "try" to withdraw. You are likely to enter an undefined state with your coins. I will wait.
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Weird, I haven't received my dividends
In my Bitcoin-Qt wallet, it is not displayed, but in MultiBit, I can see it (as well as on blockchain.info), but 0 confirmations. Do you miss it completely or just in a specific wallet? |
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