If Satoshi was a "genius", then why do BTC transactions take so long?

[Bit_Happy]

I Love BTC, but any honest look has to reveal that the transactions take WAY to long.
Did Satoshi ever comment on why he used ~10 minutes per block and/or did he consider a much lower number?
If he did, I haven't seen it before.



Edit:
<off topic>
Almost everything related to BTC transaction times, but discuss it if you wish.
</off topic>

<On Topic>
I wanted to learn what Satoshi said about it, and someone did answer, thanks
Also interested in more related Satosho quotes if you have any.

[FeedbackLoop]

If Bit_Happy was a 490 activity user then why hasn't he seen the endless topics and pages written on this? Especially a LTC user... why the sudden curiosity i wonder...

[Bit_Happy]

If Bit_Happy was a 490 activity user then why hasn't he seen the endless topics and pages written on this? Especially a LTC user... why the sudden curiosity i wonder...

why the sudden curiosity
I paid a transaction fee and the transaction is still unconfirmed after a "almost unbelievable" amount of time.

Endless topics and pages written on this?
I've seen the long transaction times discussed, but never Satoshi commenting on it.


@Holliday Are you saying BTC transaction do not take too long?
Sheesh...

[farlack]

It should be an average of 10 minutes, I've seen 10 blocks found in a minute.

[seriouscoin]

If Bit_Happy was a 490 activity user then why hasn't he seen the endless topics and pages written on this? Especially a LTC user... why the sudden curiosity i wonder...

why the sudden curiosity
I paid a transaction fee and the transaction is still unconfirmed after a "almost unbelievable" amount of time.

Endless topics and pages written on this?
I've seen the long transaction times discussed, but never Satoshi commenting on it.


@Holliday Are you saying BTC transaction do not take too long?
Sheesh...

10 min is nothing compare to current banking system. Heck even a check deposit can takes days to confirm.

However both transactions are instant (bitcoins and check deposits). My transactions are always broadcasted and instantly in queue (that means its very hard, nearly impossible, for me to double spend it unless i'm an operator of GHash lol)

I believe Satoshi thinks 10min is an appropriate time required for a global payment network. I dont think faster confirmation times would give any benefit but potential nonstop-able forking in case of attack.

[Tomatocage]

I think you're confusing transactions with confirmations. The former is almost instant.

[hodlmybtc]

You can compare it to a creditcard payment, the transaction takes places almost instantly.

With a creditcard sweeping your card only confirms you have the funds to pay, but the actual payment is done days later and can be charged back up to 90 days.

If you're trading for a lot of money waiting for a couple confirmations is in fact really short comparing it to other payment methods.

[S4VV4S]

You can compare it to a creditcard payment, the transaction takes places almost instantly.

With a creditcard sweeping your card only confirms you have the funds to pay, but the actual payment is done days later and can be charged back up to 90 days.

If you're trading for a lot of money waiting for a couple confirmations is in fact really short comparing it to other payment methods.

^^^^ What he/she said.
Bitcoin is the fastest electronic payment protocol in existence.

[jonald_fyookball]

If Michael Jordan was a "great basketball player", then why did he only score 30 points per game?

[railzand]

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=423.msg3819#msg3819

I believe it'll be possible for a payment processing company to provide as a service the rapid distribution of transactions with good-enough checking in something like 10 seconds or less.

The network nodes only accept the first version of a transaction they receive to incorporate into the block they're trying to generate.  When you broadcast a transaction, if someone else broadcasts a double-spend at the same time, it's a race to propagate to the most nodes first.  If one has a slight head start, it'll geometrically spread through the network faster and get most of the nodes.

A rough back-of-the-envelope example:
1         0
4         1
16        4
64        16
80%      20%

So if a double-spend has to wait even a second, it has a huge disadvantage.

The payment processor has connections with many nodes.  When it gets a transaction, it blasts it out, and at the same time monitors the network for double-spends.  If it receives a double-spend on any of its many listening nodes, then it alerts that the transaction is bad.  A double-spent transaction wouldn't get very far without one of the listeners hearing it.  The double-spender would have to wait until the listening phase is over, but by then, the payment processor's broadcast has reached most nodes, or is so far ahead in propagating that the double-spender has no hope of grabbing a significant percentage of the remaining nodes.

[franky1]

I Love BTC, but any honest look has to reveal that the transactions take WAY to long.
Did Satoshi ever comment on why he used ~10 minutes per block and/or did he consider a much lower number?
If he did, I haven't seen it before.

this exact question was asked a couple weeks ago.. so again

imagine 5 years ago satoshi seen that banking does things in 3-5 days and originally came up with a concept of bitcoins confirming in 30 minutes.. a bit of debate ensued and every agreed on 10 minutes.

now imagine if today bitcoin was invented (instead of 2009). and the confirm time was agreed as 2 minutes... in 5 years time your future successor would be on a forum complaining that 2 minutes is a long time and you want a 40 second confirm time.

now imagine if in 5 years time bitcoin was invented (instead of 2009) with a 40 second confirm time.. your successor would complain and want a 8 second confirm time,

blah etc blah... endless loop of arguements

[Lauda]

Transactions don't take long, confirmations do.

[S4VV4S]

I Love BTC, but any honest look has to reveal that the transactions take WAY to long.
Did Satoshi ever comment on why he used ~10 minutes per block and/or did he consider a much lower number?
If he did, I haven't seen it before.

this exact question was asked a cople weeks ago.. so again

imagine 5 years ago satosi seen banking does things in 3-5 days and originally came up with a concept of bitcoins confirming in 30 minutes.. a bit of debate ensued and every agred on 10 minutes.

now imagine if today bitcoin was invented (instead of 2009). and the confirm time was agreed as 2 minutes... in 5 years time your future successor would be on a forum complaining that 2 minutes is a long time and you want a 40 second confirm time.

now imagine if in 5 years time bitcoin was invented (instead of 2009) with a 40 second confirm time.. your successor would complain and want a 8 second confirm time,

blah etc blah... endless loop of arguements

Correct!
That would also probably mean that Bitcoins will be mined sooner than expected.

[Bit_Happy]

I edited the OP, to be more clear:

Edit:
<off topic>
Almost everything related to BTC transaction times, but discuss it if you wish.
</off topic>


<On Topic>
I wanted to learn what Satoshi said about it, and someone did answer, thanks
Also interested in more related Satosho quotes if you have any.

[greenlion]

It's a tradeoff between the granularity of confirmations and the probability of creating orphans. Satoshi actually picked a pretty good sweet spot.

[railzand]

The current system where every user is a network node is not the intended configuration for large scale.  That would be like every Usenet user runs their own NNTP server.  The design supports letting users just be users.  The more burden it is to run a node, the fewer nodes there will be.  Those few nodes will be big server farms.  The rest will be client nodes that only do transactions and don't generate.

Besides, 10 minutes is too long to verify that payment is good.  It needs to be as fast as swiping a credit card is today.

See the snack machine thread, I outline how a payment processor could verify payments well enough, actually really well (much lower fraud rate than credit cards), in something like 10 seconds or less.  If you don't believe me or don't get it, I don't have time to try to convince you, sorry.
http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=423.msg3819#msg3819

This is one of my favourites, but it still doesn't quite answer your questions.

You can just look him up for yourself, like a normal forum member.

Some of those early conversations are much clearer and easy to get 'it' into my thick head.

Another trick is to invert the date order in bitcoin discussion. See you in 3 months!

[MoonShadow]

I Love BTC, but any honest look has to reveal that the transactions take WAY to long.

Transactions average 1.4 seconds from anywhere to anywhere.  Transaction clearing is what blocks are doing.  Transaction clearance for credit cards take between 30 and 45 days.

Did Satoshi ever comment on why he used ~10 minutes per block and/or did he consider a much lower number?

Yes he did.  He chose the 10 minute interval because it was a long enough period to prevent orphaned blocks, most of the time, due to more than one node discovering a block solution within the time period it takes to propagate a block from one edge of the network to the other.  He was assuming that, in a future that Bitcoin was wildly successful, blocks would be very large data sets and the p2p network would be very large; both contributing to network delays that might extend the time for a block to propogate from edge to edge for up to a whole minute.  Therefore, in order to limit the risk of orphaned blocks (and the blockchain splits that often accompany them) the target interval had to be several times longer than the worst case scenario for block propogation delays.  He also wanted the interval to fit neatly into human time cycles for our mental convience.  He could have done a 6 min block interval, for 10 per hour, but he was concerned that wouldn't be enough.  His fears seem correct, because even with the 10 minute interval we average about 1.5% of blocks released onto the network are orphaned.  A 6 minute interval would make that much worse, and 2 minute interval would make that rate simply awful.

[Brangdon]

Also, even a 1 minute delay would be too long to wait in many situations. Especially as that would be the average and some confirmations would take longer. When I'm paying by credit card at a supermarket, if it takes as much as 10 seconds it annoys me. When I've finished and paid I don't want to hang around, waiting. So faster confirmation times don't really help unless they are a lot faster, like 50 times faster.

(I don't know whether Satoshi made this point, and don't much care.)

[Toby!]

You can compare it to a creditcard payment, the transaction takes places almost instantly.

With a creditcard sweeping your card only confirms you have the funds to pay, but the actual payment is done days later and can be charged back up to 90 days.

If you're trading for a lot of money waiting for a couple confirmations is in fact really short comparing it to other payment methods.

That's not exactly comparing like with like.  The credit/debit card system is designed to operate this way.  

A better comparison is a bank transfer which, here in the uk, usually only takes a minute or so.

[howzar]

If Michael Jordan was a "great basketball player", then why did he only score 30 points per game?

Worst. Analogy. Evar.