BITCOIN IS TOO SLOW TO EVER SUCCEED AS ONLINE CURRENCY

[mutikainen]

can it become faster?

[Come-from-Beyond]

can it become faster?

No. 10 min between blocks is by design.

[RodeoX]

Is typing in caps supposed to lend credibility to your assertion?
Because you have a quite an uphill climb in arguing that bitcoin can't succeed, even as it succeeds beyond our wildest dreams.

[megablue]

i have an idea to speed up the transaction - make it happens instantly.

For daily usage, like buying a coffee...
I guess some big player can develop some sort of payment gateway that supports real world currency (or faster cryptocurrency) and bitcoin at the same time. The idea is, you will need equal value of faster currency in your account in order to spend your bitcoin.

1. The gateway would pay for the coffee on your behalf instantly (to the merchant account) given that you have enough 'reserve' in your account.
2. the gateway would hold your 'reserve' (faster) currency until the bitcoin transaction is confirmed.  
3. gateway then releases the reserve as soon as your bitcoin transaction is confirmed.

for larger transaction, i believe that the wait is barable?

[Come-from-Beyond]

It's a way back to fiat and fractional reserve. Don't count me in.

[andrewattheu]

paypal is much slower than bitcoin....much slower

[Akka]

You get get you transaction shown in the matter of seconds in your client.

The confirmations only mean that the transaction is now irreversible!

Do you know how long it takes until a PayPal or CreditCard transaction is irreversible? Up to 180 days!

So I would say Bitcoin is incredibly fast.

[cubism4nerds]

True true - but transferring via BitInstant can be sometimes very frustratingly slow...   

[cbad]

This is ludicrous.  I had to wait 2-3 days for a wire transfer to clear.  I have to wait 2-3 days for my direct deposit paycheck to clear.  Same with credit cards.  Gas I bought 2 days ago is still "pending" at the hold rate.  That's a 100USD hold for a 40USD tank of gas.

[josvazg]

I am sorry, but I think everybody here is wrong in a way or the other, even bitcoinologist.

It all depends on the Use Case...

1) Online monetary transactions: Bitcoin RULES!
Bitcoin is faster than anything else that existed BEFORE (eg. paypal). I think anybody already agrees in that...
...BUT "faster" doesn't mean "instantaneous", bitcoinologist is right about that, instantaneous is "SECONDS" NOT "MINUTES". Here many bitcoiners blinded by lack of auto-critic or excess of love for the tool/currency are changing the meaning of "instantaneous" to avoid admitting that there is room for improvement in that area.


2) Online goods/services transactions: Bitcoin RULES!
Here is where I think bitcoinologist is wrong. Most, if not all, web services and web shops are don't deliver instantaneously. It is perfectly fine taking 10 minutes or an 1 hour to receive an email for a new DNS service that will have to propagate anyway, plane tickets, train tickets, goods that are going to be delivered later in the day, etc.
When the costumer clicks "buy", you just check the transaction when through and reply "Congratulations! your purchase was successful!"... which DOESN'T mean that you are NOT checking its confirmations on the background and can revert or suspend the goods or service delivery if anything wrong is detected 1 hour later.


3) "In person" transactions: Bitcoin is inconvenient most of the time.
Merchants of small goods/services cannot wait 10 minutes for 1 confirmation or 6h for a the proposed confirmations. Bitcoiners replies to this are unsatisfactory and a symptom of too much self-complacency on bitcoin and lack of auto-critic:

 - They say the merchant should risk the money cause it's unlikely that it will be lost. But again, the merchant could disagree, even if it does that with VISA. Cause in VISA at least both the buyer AND the VISA company are identified and the merchant could sue someone, while in bitcoin the money is lost and the buyer might not be identified most of the time. Imagine Carrefour or Walmart, for instance, they probably would never accept bitcoins due to fear of some hacker group coordinating an attack on their shops attacking it to steal lots of goods on a prepared coordinated fashion.

 - Others say that they could use a service provider, but that violates the philosophy that you can can be (if you prefer) your own service provider on all matters.

The facts remains that:

1- Bitcoin mining is what makes bitcoin so useful and successful BUT...

2- But at the same time, making all transactions speed depend on mining speed does not sound right.

3- Bitcoin potential success means scalability problems: most clients mobile phones already and soon PCs wont be able to keep up with the block chain size and growth traffic, so they will have to trust external providers... just like the ripple protocol consensus does.


My proposal, that none has taken a minute to tell me what they see wrong about it is:

Why doesn't bitcoin aim for a decentralized instant (meaning seconds) transactions like this?

A) At some point, a second blockchain is created, it can be linked hashed to a certain block. This new block chain does have very little to zero mining reward. Lets call it "the fast block chain or FTB".

B) The original block chain or OTB is untouched, it works just as it does now, maybe with smaller rewards to allocate the ones in the faster block chain.

C) Transactions can refer to outputs on both block chains.

D) The FTB could work like the OTB but using a mining cycle of 3 seconds instead of 10 minutes. Or, without mining, it could use a 3 seconds consensus algorithm just like in ripple to close a block.

E) Transaction fees on the FTB will be higher on the FTB than on the OTB (but don't need to be expensive) to reward FTB miners/servers.

F) Transaction load on the OTB will decrease, making small transactions that don't pay fees faster or even able to get through at all. (Imagine what would happen on an single unimproved bitcoin chain) to tiny transactions when handling thousands of tps, many won't get through for many, many blocks. Others may never get through cause there is always another more rewarding, even if its days/weeks/years younger.


And I don't buy the go to ripple then... Ripple weak spot for me is their lack of mining. One company created all the XRPs? I don't trust that. Mining is better than that, the problem is that what is good for mining may not be so good for "instantaneous decentralized transaction confirmation".

[Come-from-Beyond]

I am sorry, but I think everybody here is wrong in a way or the other, even bitcoinologist.

1) Online monetary transactions: Bitcoin RULES!
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2) Online goods/services transactions: Bitcoin RULES!
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U r not an exception, btw. In 1st and 2nd use cases Bitcoin sucks coz it's irreversible. U can't charge back bitcoins. If u r a seller it's good for u, but if u r a buyer this definitely sucks.

[Akka]

I am sorry, but I think everybody here is wrong in a way or the other, even bitcoinologist.

So you are also waiting 180 Days on a Credit Card transaction until it's "confirmed" and can't be reversed anymore?

Confirmations only mean there is no possibility of fraud anymore.

A 0 confirmation transaction is still by the several orders of magnitude saver than a Credit Card or PayPal transaction.

Like already said a 100 Times. Waiting for confirmation makes onnly sense for High Value Goods and for high turnover trading.

[Dabs]

Bitcoin wasn't designed for either microtransactions, or for speed, in it's original protocol. However, bitcoin is excellent for anything that is willing to wait at least a block or 10 minutes.

For example:
1. pay your rent, your bills. electricity, water, phone, internet, cable TV, gas, etc.
2. buy something downloadable content. you get emailed the link in 10 minutes.
3. anything you'd normally write a check for.
4. buy credits or load for certain services, like cell phone air time or online video games (MMORPG)
5. pay for toll (those things that beep in your car for access to toll roads or high speed highways)
6. pay your hotel bill, your hospital bill. You are staying for longer than 10 or 20 minutes.
7. dine in inside a fancy restaurant. you eat. you pay. you finish eating. you can leave. this can even work for fast food.
8. for any service that requires you to come back for it later: alter clothes, change the oil in your car, car wash, repair your computer or your gadget.
9. to pay for jail breaking your iphone, or unlocking your cell phone, or rooting your android device (if you don't know how to do this yourself.)
10. buying anything that will get shipped the next day, like hardware, barbells, toys, sports equipment.

And if you're into gambling, many bitcoin dice games are near instant.

For all those purposes above, bitcoin can be used. Merchants just need an internet connection to confirm your payment. They all have that anyway.

[Trongersoll]

What i see as a problem for merchant trying to use bitcoin is pricing. how can you realistically price your merchandise when the Value of BTC changes drasticly daily? currently it seems that all it is good for  is speculators and miners. To be usable a currancy needs a relatively stable value.

[Akka]

What i see as a problem for merchant trying to use bitcoin is pricing. how can you realistically price your merchandise when the Value of BTC changes drasticly daily? currently it seems that all it is good for  is speculators and miners. To be usable a currancy needs a relatively stable value.

The Price will stabilize at some point (it can't go up like this for ever).

Until then. There are payment providers, that give you the equivalent in €,$ etc. at the moment of the purchase and do all calculations for you. Using one of those you can accept BTC and still price in Fiat.

[josvazg]

Again,

what's wrong with upgrading bitcoin support instantly confirmed decentralized payment in addition to the ones it already supports?

Can anybody explain what problems do they see in that?

[Akka]

Again,

what's wrong with upgrading bitcoin support instantly confirmed decentralized payment in addition to the ones it already supports?

Can anybody explain what problems do they see in that?

The problem is, that Bitcoin is build about that confirmations in Blocks. It's necessary to ensure that Bitcoin is resilient to attacks.

Therefore the Mining ensures that an attacker would nee more than 50% of all Processing Power mining on the "good" site to have a long term success.

If you want faster confirmations, the Bandwidth requirements for the network increase to not find a lot of orphan blocks.

If you want instant confirmations and still no central authority you would basically need unlimited bandwidth.

I don't understand what the problem with 0 confirmations is. Do you have any Idea how hard it is to double spend a transaction.

The only really Dangerous attack requires the participation of a miner with a reasonable % of the networks hashing power and even than success is improbable.

So the costs of a successful double spend would require Mining Equipment worth Millions of $ by now.

Is this dangerous for day to day transactions?

[josvazg]

Then this paper should be wrong:
http://people.scs.carleton.ca/~clark/biblio/bitcoin/Karame%202012.pdf

"In this paper, we analyze the security of using
Bitcoin for fast payments, where the time between
the exchange of currency and goods is ... seconds).

We focus on doublespending attacks on fast payments and demonstrate
that these attacks can be mounted at low cost on
currently deployed versions of Bitcoin.

We further show that the measures recommended by Bitcoin developers for the use of Bitcoin in fast transactions are
not always effective in resisting double-spending; we
show that if those recommendations are integrated
in future Bitcoin implementations, double-spending
attacks on Bitcoin will still be possible.

Finally, we leverage on our findings and propose a lightweight
countermeasure that enables the detection of doublespending attacks in fast transactions."

I haven't read it all yet, I am curious about the "lightweight countermeasure" they purpose...

But this proves that the one saying "this is slow" had a point!

So what do you reply now?

[Akka]

This would still require that you relay a transaction to a vendor, while getting a similar transaction to a miner. Without the Vendor or the miner seeing the double transaction before the other. That's hard and expensive to accomplish.

This paper is from mid 2012, my understanding is that this is practically fixed. (Not 100% sure though)

And still, with Bitcoin you have 1 Hour until a transaction is considered absolutely irreversibly.

With other Systems like CreditCards you have up to 180 Days until irreversibly.
It really would be the same as saying 180 days for charegbacks makes CreditCards to slow.

You are putting it as if every Bitcoiner would always try to make a double spend. All this attacks make no economical sense for low - mid value goods.

And no one would accept your credit card when you buy something like a house.

Only Cash is saver for fast payments than Bitcoin.

Sorry if I sound offensive, but I really don't get the issue.

[mateo]

Hi,

Well for all the plusses, all the hype, all the talk of global change. There is ONE SMALL chink in the bitcoin Armour. For all the zero transactions, anonymity, security etc etc

IT IS TOO DAMN SLOW  !!

Unless bitcoin can match paypal/credit card for speed of use, all the pluses will be forgotten as joe public is left waiting for 10 mins, 2 hours or even the next day wondering if his/her bitcoin transaction  has confirmed.

Seriously, in light of the massive surge in bitcoin, currently driven by hype and stock broker mentality buying and speculating. IF bitcoin is ever to take over paypal and its other cronies, we need to be as quick.

Or, it will forever flounder as an experiment, great for blackmarket, some merchants will offer it but...that will be its zenith reached.

The whole concept of online transactions is INSTANT. SPEED, ONE CLICK...JOB DONE.

Bitcoin cannot offer this as the current rate of how the block chain works.

Thank you for you purchase, you might have the auction you wanted, you may have got the domain you wanted but give us a few hours or well, could be 10 mins, could be tomorrow and we will let you know if your transaction completed in time to get the purchase you wanted.

Ya righty !!....Ill use paypal or credit card.

PayPal is faster that Bitcoin? You must be high.
Bitcoins are one reason I no longer need to use ShitPal as much. For this I am grateful.