Transaction confirmation time down

[TaunSew]

Lol at BTC which claims 15 minutes transactions.  I remember my first ever BTC purchase and it took over 8 hours for the coins to be confirmed.  Not sure why people think BTC can't be replaced by something better.

[mgio]

Average confirmation time of ~10 minutes is still quite significant. Won't cause any problem for the online shoppers. But people who want to use BTC for retail shopping won't be able to do it.

Retail transactions are routinely performed at 0 confirmations, because transaction propagation alone validates any given transaction better than any other payment method in existence already. 10 minute blocks being a hindrance to retail application is the biggest myth that absolutely refuses to die.

Except as a business owner I'm not giving you ANYTHING till I see 3 confirmations.

Well then you are going to lose customers to other businesses that are smart and realize there is no point to wait for a confirmation.

[mgio]

Average confirmation time of ~10 minutes is still quite significant. Won't cause any problem for the online shoppers. But people who want to use BTC for retail shopping won't be able to do it.

Retail transactions are routinely performed at 0 confirmations, because transaction propagation alone validates any given transaction better than any other payment method in existence already. 10 minute blocks being a hindrance to retail application is the biggest myth that absolutely refuses to die.

Except as a business owner I'm not giving you ANYTHING till I see 3 confirmations.

There is really no need for that. Once you see the transaction go through, even without confirmations, you are safe.
The transaction will end up going through...there is no way for the purchaser to reverse it once you see it show up.

OK, I thought that having 51% of the hashing power allows you to do just that and more....

Exactly! Since nobody controls or will control 51% of the hashing power, there is no fear for a business owner.

You could double spend the transaction.

If you control 10% of the hash power, you can replace the Tx in your mempool with one that overrides the existing one. It'll have a 10% chance of working.

Who controls even 10% of the hashpower??

And why would you risk losing your 25 bitcoin block reward just to have a small chance of double-spending some satoshi at your local starbucks, lol.

Any amount of money that would be comparable to the current block reward (25 btc) would wait for one confirmation at least.

Double spending <<1 BTC isn't worth the pain it would take to have the small chance of succeeding.

Do you remember when grocery stores used to cash checks for you so you could do your shopping? People defrauded them all the time and they'd put up your picture and never accept checks from you again. It was part of the cost of doing business but brought in a lot of customers because it was convenient.

 

[mgio]

One could theoretically create an app that first sends out the payment to the merchant's address. But immediately after that also sends the same to 50 other addresses too. I think there is a chance one of those 50 will get confirmed and the merchant could end up with nothing. Is this possible?

It's possible but the merchant would see the duplicate transactions almost immediately. And then one transaction would very very quickly spread over the network kicking the other ones out, I believe.

The way to successfully double spend is to submit the transaction at two different nodes very far from each other. Even then, you only have seconds at most to grab the merchandise and run before the merchant notices the double spend. And you only have a 50/50 chance of it succeeding. And that is also assuming the merchant isn't very well connected to the bitcoin network. It isn't easy to do in practice, for small transactions it doesn't even matter, and usually will be noticed by the merchant.

[bryant.coleman]

Retail transactions are routinely performed at 0 confirmations, because transaction propagation alone validates any given transaction better than any other payment method in existence already. 10 minute blocks being a hindrance to retail application is the biggest myth that absolutely refuses to die.

That will be good. But there is a risk of double-spending.

Except as a business owner I'm not giving you ANYTHING till I see 3 confirmations.

Hmm.... So you will tell your customers to wait for half an hour until you get those confirmations?

[Buffer Overflow]

I remember my first ever BTC purchase and it took over 8 hours for the coins to be confirmed.

If the correct fee is attached this generally doesn't happen.

[greenlion]

Retail transactions are routinely performed at 0 confirmations, because transaction propagation alone validates any given transaction better than any other payment method in existence already. 10 minute blocks being a hindrance to retail application is the biggest myth that absolutely refuses to die.

That will be good. But there is a risk of double-spending.

There is essentially 0 risk of double-spending, because even trying to do something like this requires what amounts to a very sophisticated Sybil attack whereby you've essentially ostracized the retailer's node from seeing your double spend long enough for that double spend to beat your original transaction in network propagation.

The chance of success is completely probabilistic in nature and extremely remote, and the moment we're talking about an amount of value where that even remotely becomes worth pursuing, now we're in the realm of waiting for confs, and that entire vector of attack goes out the window the moment a single conf even happens.

[skooter]

Average confirmation time of ~10 minutes is still quite significant. Won't cause any problem for the online shoppers. But people who want to use BTC for retail shopping won't be able to do it.

Retail transactions are routinely performed at 0 confirmations, because transaction propagation alone validates any given transaction better than any other payment method in existence already. 10 minute blocks being a hindrance to retail application is the biggest myth that absolutely refuses to die.

Except as a business owner I'm not giving you ANYTHING till I see 3 confirmations.

There is really no need for that. Once you see the transaction go through, even without confirmations, you are safe.
The transaction will end up going through...there is no way for the purchaser to reverse it once you see it show up.

OK, I thought that having 51% of the hashing power allows you to do just that and more....

Exactly! Since nobody controls or will control 51% of the hashing power, there is no fear for a business owner.

You could double spend the transaction.

If you control 10% of the hash power, you can replace the Tx in your mempool with one that overrides the existing one. It'll have a 10% chance of working.

Who controls even 10% of the hashpower??

And why would you risk losing your 25 bitcoin block reward just to have a small chance of double-spending some satoshi at your local starbucks, lol.

Any amount of money that would be comparable to the current block reward (25 btc) would wait for one confirmation at least.

Double spending <<1 BTC isn't worth the pain it would take to have the small chance of succeeding.

Do you remember when grocery stores used to cash checks for you so you could do your shopping? People defrauded them all the time and they'd put up your picture and never accept checks from you again. It was part of the cost of doing business but brought in a lot of customers because it was convenient.

 

Are you serious?

The majority of the hash power is concentrated in pools that control > 10% of the hash power.

There's also no risk losing your 25 btc block reward. All you're doing is replacing a tx in the mempool with a different tx.

And if this were done, it wouldn't be done to scam starbux outta a $3 coffee. Someone could buy thousands of dollars worth of stuff at best buy and do it.

[amspir]

OK, I thought that having 51% of the hashing power allows you to do just that and more....

Assuming that you already had 51% control of the network, and at the current rate of $3 per GH/s for modern mining equipment, it would require about 15 million USD a week to maintain 51% control.   An entity that was large enough to have the initial capital and maintain that kind of cash flow is probably not going to be in the business of defrauding retail bitcoin transactions.