90 minutes for 1 block...

[SgtSpike]

Society simply does not have the patience to wait around for their money to go through. We are a want it gotta have it now society.
 

ya I love it when I get to pay 5% and have to wait 3 days to send money overseas too.....

90 minutes? 0.001%? Outrage!

You are not the norm. Most people want it now and do not care about a fee. For example; credit cards and the fee's that are charged to merchants and get passed on to product cost. Most people know about those fees and simply do not care because they got their instant gratification.

That's less about instant gratification and more about not wanting to wait for 90 minutes at a checkout stand.

[Portnoy]

(BTW I'm also very into hot ladies  !) 

Oh you're a big boy aren't you.   

Are you any more successful with that pump em and dump em scheme?
 
( probably up to the point where you drop your drawers and the scam becomes obvious )

[SgtSpike]

Hey, I completely agree with you Holliday.  I just didn't like the way sharky said that people paying with debit/credit cards only care about instant gratification and don't care about the fees.

[sharky112065]

Hey, I completely agree with you Holliday.  I just didn't like the way sharky said that people paying with debit/credit cards only care about instant gratification and don't care about the fees.

But it's true, most people do not care about those fees they don't see on their statements and or receipts and they do want their products and services right away.

A Bitcoin credit/debit card would be nice, but there still would be hidden fees associated with it and proves my point that we are a gotta have it now/instant gratification society.

[SgtSpike]

Hey, I completely agree with you Holliday.  I just didn't like the way sharky said that people paying with debit/credit cards only care about instant gratification and don't care about the fees.

But it's true, most people do not care about those fees they don't see on their statements and or receipts and they do want their products and services right away.

A Bitcoin credit/debit card would be nice, but there still would be hidden fees associated with it and proves my point that we are a gotta have it now/instant gratification society.

I disagree.  Tell me, how else are you going to solve physical point-of-sale with Bitcoin?

[sharky112065]

Hey, I completely agree with you Holliday.  I just didn't like the way sharky said that people paying with debit/credit cards only care about instant gratification and don't care about the fees.

But it's true, most people do not care about those fees they don't see on their statements and or receipts and they do want their products and services right away.

A Bitcoin credit/debit card would be nice, but there still would be hidden fees associated with it and proves my point that we are a gotta have it now/instant gratification society.

I disagree.  Tell me, how else are you going to solve physical point-of-sale with Bitcoin?

I do not know how to solve physical point-of-sale with Bitcoin. I do know using a credit/debit card with fees hidden or otherwise is no better than what we have now.

Edit: Also I believe we are getting off topic from the OP. The OP was complaining about how long he or she had to wait for a transaction to go through. A large monetary amount to transfer would not be feasible with a credit/debit card.

[gmaxwell]

How is your child pr0n market going?

This is really reprehensible.

For those who are missing the context— goat was running some secretive business that looked like it was either a HYIP front or a money laundering operation that was attracting a lot of miners with its wild returns (it was subsequently shut down after a lot of people started asking questions; and his primary competition has more recently vanished with a bunch of people's funds).  I was concerned that people were joining in eager for the BIG MONEY without being aware of the risks in whatever they were getting involved in. I tried to get some confidence in private that what he was doing wasn't going to result in a bunch of overly credulous bitcoiners getting ripped off or arrested but Goat did not respond.

I posted in public basically outlining the risks— e.g. that people receiving funds from him should be asking sharp questions about the origins of the money because if the funds were being laundered for child porn, arms, or drug deals law enforcement may be knocking at the door of the people receiving the funds. Goat's response was to put up a _bounty_ of several hundred BTC for someone to fabricate evidence of me being involved in these activities.   Is this the kind of person you want to do business with?

He removed the bounty after I started inquiring about collecting it myself— after I'd started on fabricating some evidence too. Bummer.

Apparently some other forum moderator was already investigating him because someone with a very similar name to Goat's business had been trying to sell Thailand sourced child porn on the forums. I wasn't aware of this but I guess my inquiry struck a nerve. Goat also put up a similar bounty about the moderator investigating this, though I believe it was closed as just a coincidence.

In any case, any time we interact he's sure to spread these BS rumors, I don't mind too much because it just makes another example of what a despicable person he is and why no one should do any business with him.

[K1773R]

How is your child pr0n market going?

This is really reprehensible.

For those who are missing the context— goat was running some secretive business that looked like it was either a HYIP front or a money laundering operation that was attracting a lot of miners with its wild returns (it was subsequently shut down after a lot of people started asking questions; and his primary competition has more recently vanished with a bunch of people's funds).  I was concerned that people were joining in eager for the BIG MONEY without being aware of the risks in whatever they were getting involved in. I tried to get some confidence in private that what he was doing wasn't going to result in a bunch of overly credulous bitcoiners getting ripped off or arrested but Goat did not respond.

I posted in public basically outlining the risks— e.g. that people receiving funds from him should be asking sharp questions about the origins of the money because if the funds were being laundered for child porn, arms, or drug deals law enforcement may be knocking at the door of the people receiving the funds. Goat's response was to put up a _bounty_ of several hundred BTC for someone to fabricate evidence of me being involved in these activities.   Is this the kind of person you want to do business with?

He removed the bounty after I started inquiring about collecting it myself— after I'd started on fabricating some evidence too. Bummer.

Apparently some other forum moderator was already investigating him because someone with a very similar name to Goat's business had been trying to sell Thailand sourced child porn on the forums. I wasn't aware of this but I guess my inquiry struck a nerve. Goat also put up a similar bounty about the moderator investigating this, though I believe it was closed as just a coincidence.

In any case, any time we interact he's sure to spread these BS rumors, I don't mind too much because it just makes another example of what a despicable person he is and why no one should do any business with him.

just use the "ignore" link

[acoindr]

Yeah, like once every 4 years...   But anyway a faster coin will come around soon enough...

Not one based on the bitcoin algorithm.  Litecoin is already too fast most likely.

The Bitcoin algorithm is not convergent when the highest latency (including all block validation time) bisection of the hash rate becomes higher than the mean time between blocks.

What do you mean bisection of the hash rate? Difficulty is adjusted automatically so block creation moves toward the target regardless of hash rate. I think you meant bisection of miners, which would make more sense. But even that is problematic. How do you split miners mining coins into two halves? Mining, like Bitcoin, is decentralized.

E.g. if a chain has a 3 minute average block time an it takes 3 minutes for some half of the miners to hear from and validate another half, then most of the time a new block will be found in each half before it's heard about the other half's blocks and the two will form longer and longer forks, which take longer and longer to reorg between. The result is a partition with the halves not able to agree on the history of transactions.

At current transactions levels (which are only a portion of the maximum allowed) Bitcoin is already seeing multi-minute propagation in some cases.

Now multi-minute propagation is interesting, and something I hadn't considered for Bitcoin or Litecoin, so I can see your point. Invalid blocks do result currently with Bitcoin from latency of miners learning of found blocks elsewhere due to the network effect.

This problem should worsen as Bitcoin adoption grows and the network expands. So this could conceivably be a problem for Bitcoin, Litecoin, or any cryptocurrency with a block creation around 10 minutes or less on average. Mining invalid blocks is a waste of resources for miners, which would be a disincentive where there is supposed to be incentive. Frequently occurring invalid blocks also complicates trust in confirmations.

However, I think there is a simple solution. It's in everyone's best interest to know of a valid found block as soon as possible. This way work can start on the next block with minimal wasted resources for no reward. While it's not called for in the protocol I think there can be developed what I'd call mining block references or MBRs. This is simply one or more online resources (nodes or sites) where miners can report and check for found blocks. Since all miners (or a significant number anyway) would reference only a few nodes, polling say every few seconds, communication of found blocks could be near instantaneous regardless of network size.

The network effect exists now because Bitcoin is designed to be decentralized. However, smart centralization of some aspects, especially non-critical functions like this can be beneficial. Note this doesn't change the protocol. It's just a reference on top of how things already work. Satoshi's white paper says "When a node finds a proof-of-work, it broadcasts the block to all nodes." It doesn't say how to broadcast that information to all nodes. I think optimization of that is easily accomplished with MBRs.

[acoindr]

This is why I have always thought that Bitcoin would not ever replace other currency in its entirety. Society simply does not have the patience to wait around for their money to go through. We are a want it gotta have it now society.
 

Yeah, BTC has advantages for sure. However it wont last 20 years... We need results now...

You can't just keep switching to new coins. Is their some reason bitcoin can't be improved upon?

Yes, you can. I'm working on a post that explains that in fact.

Bitcoin is set. If you make changes to it then it's no longer Bitcoin. It is something else.

[acoindr]

This is why LTC

Why wouldnt/couldn't be waiting for 4 LTC confirms?  As I understand it LTC confirms blocks 4 times faster and therefor to get the confidence of 1 BTC confirm you would have to wait for 4 LTC confirms.

No, that's not true. Confirmation simply let's you know a certain amount of computational work went into the block with your transaction, and the more confirmations you have the less likely it is that block will turn out to be invalid. Regardless of how fast the block is found you can have extremely large amounts of computational power necessary to have found it.

In other words, if Litcoin's network was already the same size as Bitcoin's network, and assuming there was no problem with invalid blocks due to network latency, then 1 Litcoin confirmation would be about equal to 1 Bitcoin confirmation.

[Rassah]

This is why I have always thought that Bitcoin would not ever replace other currency in its entirety. Society simply does not have the patience to wait around for their money to go through. We are a want it gotta have it now society.
 

Yeah, BTC has advantages for sure. However it wont last 20 years... We need results now...

You can't just keep switching to new coins. Is their some reason bitcoin can't be improved upon?

Yes, you can. I'm working on a post that explains that in fact.

Bitcoin is set. If you make changes to it then it's no longer Bitcoin. It is something else.

If it was Bitcoin before the hard fork change in Spring that allowed multi-signature transactions (pay-to-script?), and it is no longer Bitcoin because of that change... what is it that we are using now?

[acoindr]

This is why I have always thought that Bitcoin would not ever replace other currency in its entirety. Society simply does not have the patience to wait around for their money to go through. We are a want it gotta have it now society.
 

Yeah, BTC has advantages for sure. However it wont last 20 years... We need results now...

You can't just keep switching to new coins. Is their some reason bitcoin can't be improved upon?

Yes, you can. I'm working on a post that explains that in fact.

Bitcoin is set. If you make changes to it then it's no longer Bitcoin. It is something else.

If it was Bitcoin before the hard fork change in Spring that allowed multi-signature transactions (pay-to-script?), and it is no longer Bitcoin because of that change... what is it that we are using now?

We are using the current version of Bitcoin the community agrees is Bitcoin. That doesn't mean it's the same as it always was.

For example, my understanding is that early on a software issue allowed someone to generate a transaction giving their address millions of valid coins. The bug was patched and code was added to ignore the block with that transaction as well as all subsequent blocks after it. This change required everybody to upgrade - users, merchants, and miners - which everyone did and life went on. So we are not using that original Bitcoin, but something else we still call Bitcoin using some of the blockchain from that early version.

If you make a change incompatible with the blockchain, like changing the number of coins scheduled to be created then those coins (like Litecoin or others) will be rejected by the network. Of course, Litecoin is really still just Bitcoin, just another version.

[Portnoy]

How is your child pr0n market going?

This is really reprehensible.

For those who are missing the context— goat was running some secretive business that looked like it was either a HYIP front or a money laundering operation that was attracting a lot of miners with its wild returns (it was subsequently shut down after a lot of people started asking questions; and his primary competition has more recently vanished with a bunch of people's funds).  I was concerned that people were joining in eager for the BIG MONEY without being aware of the risks in whatever they were getting involved in. I tried to get some confidence in private that what he was doing wasn't going to result in a bunch of overly credulous bitcoiners getting ripped off or arrested but Goat did not respond.

I posted in public basically outlining the risks— e.g. that people receiving funds from him should be asking sharp questions about the origins of the money because if the funds were being laundered for child porn, arms, or drug deals law enforcement may be knocking at the door of the people receiving the funds. Goat's response was to put up a _bounty_ of several hundred BTC for someone to fabricate evidence of me being involved in these activities.   Is this the kind of person you want to do business with?

He removed the bounty after I started inquiring about collecting it myself— after I'd started on fabricating some evidence too. Bummer.

Apparently some other forum moderator was already investigating him because someone with a very similar name to Goat's business had been trying to sell Thailand sourced child porn on the forums. I wasn't aware of this but I guess my inquiry struck a nerve. Goat also put up a similar bounty about the moderator investigating this, though I believe it was closed as just a coincidence.

In any case, any time we interact he's sure to spread these BS rumors, I don't mind too much because it just makes another example of what a despicable person he is and why no one should do any business with him.

+1

I don't know how Goat has managed to avoid a scammer tag... really he should be permabanned. 

And no, we shouldn't just "ignore" him  but as a community make sure new members learn about him so they can steer clear of having anything to do with him.

[makomk]

Now multi-minute propagation is interesting, and something I hadn't considered for Bitcoin or Litecoin, so I can see your point. Invalid blocks do result currently with Bitcoin from latency of miners learning of found blocks elsewhere due to the network effect.

This problem should worsen as Bitcoin adoption grows and the network expands. So this could conceivably be a problem for Bitcoin, Litecoin, or any cryptocurrency with a block creation around 10 minutes or less on average. Mining invalid blocks is a waste of resources for miners, which would be a disincentive where there is supposed to be incentive. Frequently occurring invalid blocks also complicates trust in confirmations.

Block propagation times are currently roughly proportional to block size, so it's actually an incentive to mine smaller blocks. I know Luke-Jr has limited the number of transactions he puts into his pool's blocks for exactly this reason. The interesting part is that for a given transaction rate, the average block size is going to be roughly proportional to the time between blocks - so you can have a faster block rate with smaller blocks, or a slower block rate with bigger ones, and in theory they should converge roughly the same.

[deepceleron]

90 minutes to send cash, anywhere in the world, without needing a third party? That is amazing!

in fact the bitcoins were not reversible the the second they were send.

it just took 90 minutes to confirm it was a good tx.

I wonder that the odds are for a 90min block?

imagine we get really unlucky and hit a 3 year block  

Assuming a constant hashrate:
-The probability that a block won't be found after 10 minutes is 50%, or .5.
-The probability that a block won't be found after 20 minutes is .5 * .5 = .5 ^ 2 = 25%.
-The probability that a block won't be found after 90 minutes is .00195, 0.2%, indicating 1-in-512 blocks can be expected to take 90 minutes or more (averaging about one in four days with long-term sampling)
-The probability that a block won't be found after one day of mining is .5 ^ 144 = 0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000005%

We need a feedback mechanism to minimize very long rounds (and less importantly, very short rounds). ....

The term "rounds" is only used in pools to describe the periods between their block finds and the work/reward evaluation time.

Being able to alter the target difficulty based on included transactions (theory omitted from quote) is unacceptable; a miner could just pad his own valueless transactions in a block up to the maximum block size; everybody would be making 500K blocks and bloating the blockchain with faster-than-expected blocks.

The system now is perfect: miners have a financial incentive to include as many fee-paying transactions as possible, and a disincentive to include free transactions (as a larger block increases the risk of an orphaned block by making block propagation time longer). This keeps cruft out of the blockchain.  

[acoindr]

Now multi-minute propagation is interesting, and something I hadn't considered for Bitcoin or Litecoin, so I can see your point. Invalid blocks do result currently with Bitcoin from latency of miners learning of found blocks elsewhere due to the network effect.

This problem should worsen as Bitcoin adoption grows and the network expands. So this could conceivably be a problem for Bitcoin, Litecoin, or any cryptocurrency with a block creation around 10 minutes or less on average. Mining invalid blocks is a waste of resources for miners, which would be a disincentive where there is supposed to be incentive. Frequently occurring invalid blocks also complicates trust in confirmations.

Block propagation times are currently roughly proportional to block size, so it's actually an incentive to mine smaller blocks. I know Luke-Jr has limited the number of transactions he puts into his pool's blocks for exactly this reason. The interesting part is that for a given transaction rate, the average block size is going to be roughly proportional to the time between blocks - so you can have a faster block rate with smaller blocks, or a slower block rate with bigger ones, and in theory they should converge roughly the same.

Interesting point. I agree.

Still, with MBRs as I suggest none of that matters; block size would be irrelevant to propagation. You get rid of the network effect which is where the latency builds.

[Desolator]

Oh, God! Waited 97 minutes for the block just to see my Tx wasn't included!

How much did you spend as fee?

Standard 0.0005 BTC. Fortunately the tx was included into the next block.

See, this is what I don't get?  How fucking hard is it seriously for a pool to include all transactions?  I mean is it THAT intensive that at a certain point they just have to drop all lower paying ones or something?  Isn't a block like a couple kilobytes and formed by running a couple milliseconds of hashes?  I bet my desktop could make a 10,000 transaction block in under a second let alone a pool's web server.  This whole include or exclude system makes absolutely zero sense.

[deepceleron]

Oh, God! Waited 97 minutes for the block just to see my Tx wasn't included!

How much did you spend as fee?

Standard 0.0005 BTC. Fortunately the tx was included into the next block.

See, this is what I don't get?  How fucking hard is it seriously for a pool to include all transactions?  I mean is it THAT intensive that at a certain point they just have to drop all lower paying ones or something?  Isn't a block like a couple kilobytes and formed by running a couple milliseconds of hashes?  I bet my desktop could make a 10,000 transaction block in under a second let alone a pool's web server.  This whole include or exclude system makes absolutely zero sense.

There is a hard-coded block size limit. There is often many blocks worth of transactions waiting to be included in a block, even now.

Miners are the gatekeeper to the blockchain, they generally use the standard inclusion rules of Bitcoin, but can also modify the Bitcoin client to prioritize or limit transactions. Every single transaction that is included in a block is going to be stored on tens of thousands of computers forever; transactions use many more resources than simply a millisecond of a miner's time. Bitcoin fee and priority rules currently only discourage the spammiest of spam transactions from being sent, which is why you still see things like the hundreds of thousands of .00000001 BTC payments that satoshidice has sent in the past several months.

[helloworld]

See, this is what I don't get?  How fucking hard is it seriously for a pool to include all transactions?  I mean is it THAT intensive that at a certain point they just have to drop all lower paying ones or something?  Isn't a block like a couple kilobytes and formed by running a couple milliseconds of hashes?  I bet my desktop could make a 10,000 transaction block in under a second let alone a pool's web server.  This whole include or exclude system makes absolutely zero sense.

I find this issue a little bit similar to when businesses destroy perfectly good (over)stock, and then people complain that they should have given it away instead.

But giving it away decreases the perceived value of the remaining stock.

If miners give away the same service for free, what incentive is that for people to pay tx fees?