bitpay: few questions about how POS is handled.

[GenTarkin]

Im in the process of trying to convince my boss, my old boss and possibly a few other small business owners that accepting bitcoin would be very advantageous not only from a fraud & low fees viewpoint but also marketing.

With that, I have a question or 2, mainly 1 big one as of right now I am not sure about.

When accepting bitcoin using bitpay POS w/ their web interface and a customer thats using a cell phone. Does bitpay just wait till the transaction is detected on their node w/o any sort of confirmations before the payment is marked as paid and transferred?

If so, then what prevents someone from performing a fraudulant double spend via the few methods that are available on non confirmation transactions?

Does bitpay gauruntee(pay back merchant) against this and is willing to back if fraud has happened?
Im kinda confused how the merchant would be fully protected against this unless they waited a full 6 confirmations...and no customer is gonna wanna stand there that long.

I know for the most common type, a webpage could also be opened to blockchain.info to have a '3rd party' track the transmission of the transaction throughout the nodes. This would be added security , I think anyways. But other than that...not sure.

thanks

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[nederhoed]

As to my knowledge, a double spend needs quite some preparation and timing. So to do it on a POS-situation, would be rather hard. You need to insert two transactions on two distant places in the network.

For a coffee or a beer, that would not be worth the trouble. For a car or watch, it might be.

I do not know about the guarantees of Bitpay, but for small amounts, it should not be an issue. If you do sell luxurious watches or cars, do double check. For these amounts waiting for 2 to even 6 confirmations would not be too much of a pain.

[GenTarkin]

ok cool, so the businesses Im mainly targeting are in the retail PC industry in sales, tech, small business network etc....
We, of course, dont do very big ticket items in POS situation.
So, if I were to tout the security of bitcoin such as 'theres no risk of fraud' - that wouldnt be entirely accurate =/ grrr
well wonder what bitpay does about it...