Question about confirmation problem

[oillio]

Hello all,
I recently learned about BitCoin (from Slashdot) and I have been doing a lot of reading.
What you are doing here is really exciting.

From what I understand the confirmation speed will be a real problem for merchant acceptance of bitcoins.  The issues are complex and scary, especially if you are a non-techie.

At first blush, it seems to me, the easiest solution is to have a bulk of the day-to-day transactions go through trusted third parties.  If I am receiving a transaction from a mybitcoin account, I can trust that this transaction will confirm.
That way, a merchant simply has to understand that they accept bitcoin from the major account houses.  They don't need to know how many confirmations a transaction has, what the risks are, etc.

Is this the generally agreed direction the market will head, or am I missing something?
Is it possible to add a signature to a transaction to certify who is creating it?
Or has anyone built a secondary protocol to transfer this sort of information?

I think I may have read somewhere that transfers between mtgox and mybitcoin are instant.  Is this true?  How do they verify the origination of these transactions?

Thanks.

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[grondilu]

It is not really a "problem", rather an "issue" IMO.

Anyway, it is indeed an issue that still has to be solved.  It has been discussed here several times.



There are several solutions, and I think you described one of them correctly.



I personnaly think that a credit system would be fine.  Basically some banks would still exist in the conventionnal meaning (hopefully more anonymous though), except that accounts would be labelled in bitcoins.   Of course, an advantage is that withdrawing all your funds would take a few minutes, and not days as it is currently the case in the current banking system.

With such a traditionnal centralised accounting system, transactions would be instantaneous.

A good stuff would be a combination of this with David Chaum's blind signature, so that everything stays anonymous.

[oillio]

Has there been any work done on the technical side of implementing this sort of scheme?

How would blind signatures be helpful in this case?
From what I understand, blind signatures are used when the author of the document and the signer are different people, and the signer should not have access to the plaintext document.

In the case of certifying a transaction, the signer must be the author of the transaction.  Only the author can guarantee that a double-spend attempt is not made.