I'm seeing really slow transactions.. 20mins for the 1st and 30mins for the 2nd then upto an hour for the 6th. It's still magic but cf real world I wonder how practical that
Do you mean 20 mins to get to the 1st confirmation, 30 mins to get to the 2nd confirmation, up to 1 hour to get to the 6th?
If so that's pretty much expected. There's a block every 10 minutes on average, but if you're unlucky you won't get that, and your transaction may get left out of a block for whatever reason and end up having to wait for the next one.
You shouldn't expect that to get better. In a lot of cases you can treat the payment as paid within a few seconds when you see the transaction get broadcast across the network, as double-spends aren't very common, especially if your transaction is revocable (eg it takes you 30 minutes to bake the pizza, so you can get started making it right away and in the unlikely event that the customer tries to double-spend you can eat it yourself.)
Note that with PayPal and credit card companies transactions are often revoked after several months, so waiting an hour or so for non-revocability isn't too bad by comparison.
Are we confident yet that BTC can scale to handle large volumes of transactions?
Can each block and each miner accept enough transactions that the market doesn't stall?
This gets into all kinds of amazing combinations of technical and political issues. First there's a technical problem caused by a software bug which is preventing the network from scaling as it should. This will be solved soon. Then there's an old anti-spam setting hard-coded in the software that needs to be fixed, but some people are arguing against fixing it for various reasons. Then finally there's the issue of whether the thing will actually scale up really big, and what will happen if and when it runs into the actual technical limits. It could scale up many times before we found that out, though.
I think this will probably all work out in the end, but we can't rule out ending up with WU rates for Bitcoin, whether for political or technical reasons. It's not at all clear whether transactions will end up costing 0.1 cent or 1 cent or 10 cents or $1, and obviously that affects the ways you can use it. But I'd have thought that if Bitcoin can't scale cheaply some variant of it will end up scaling cheaply. I'm not sure whether this would end up coexisting with Bitcoin or replacing it.
Perhaps I'm wrong to have set transaction fee as 0.005BTC but then the promise is "Low or zero processing fees" and miners are making their money already.
Should all transactions be 0.01BTC and if that's the case now are we heading for WU rates in the future!.. or will miners be able to accept more transactions into each block and the fees perhaps will stay low.
You could probably have gone lower than that and still got your transaction through. Some of the client software defaults are probably higher than they need to be right now, because they were set when the exchange rates were lower.
On that thought, can any of the Alt-TC maintain an advantage by having faster confirmations.. or will they face the same issues later?
LiteCoin has faster confirmations - 1 block every 2.5 minutes IIRC. I guess the question is whether this difference will turn out to be meaningful. In practice in most of the cases where an average of 10 minutes is too long, 2.5 minutes is probably too long as well.
On the Bitcoin / LiteCoin design there's a limit to how short you can make this, because you need to make sure blocks have time to get propagated across the network properly.
