LOL...
Have any of you ever engaged in bitcoin transactions before?
I have.
I've made quite a few. I'll tell you how it goes, usually.
In the cases where I was the sender, the receiving company acknowledged my payment within seconds.
Yes, that's correct...
seconds. The transaction was nearly always for a tiny amount, about $5 equivalent, so probably they didn't feel it was necessary to wait for multiple confirmations before they acknowledged the fact that I had made a bitcoin payment to them. But literally, within seconds their payment webpage would reload, thanking me for making payment, and my email would ding, letting me know a new message had been received, and invariably, it was a confirmation email from the company...
In many other bitcoin transactions, I was both the sender and receiver... I was either sending from an exchange to my wallet or from one of my wallets to another wallet on another computer of mine or my phone. These transfers/transactions took mere seconds for the first confirmation. (Although once, it took a damned long time, and believe me: I was sweatin' that day till it got confirmed!)
Was a transaction recorded in a block at the moment I received these confirmations? No. Obviously not. But the bitcoin network was, rather quickly, acknowledging my transaction. In seconds.
From the comments in this thread, I strongly suspect the majority of you have little to no active experience of
actually using bitcoin.
Amirite?
