5 ms·

Lots of flawed arguments and logic in your post. The "commit time" (time until a transaction is considered irreversible) is 60 days for Visa, but 10-60 minutes

• michaelt 9y ago
  Then why is it when I use Visa in a shop I can leave with my item within seconds of presenting my contactless card to a reader; whereas with bitcoin sellers want to wait for at least one confirm - which takes 5-15 minutes even if I pony up a 360 satoshis/byte (~$1.90 per transaction) fee to get into the next block?
  • mrb 9y ago
    Because thanks to the extreme cautiousness of Bitcoin developers who have abundantly communicated the (small) risk of accepting zero-confirmation transactions to the public, people have generally heeded the advice of waiting for at least 1 confirmation. But in reality, if it is OK for a shop to tolerate the risk of credit card chargeback fraud (which is real and is exploited every day) then it is OK to also tolerate the risk of accepting a zero-confirmation Bitcoin tx. Notice the language I use. "Tolerate" doesn't mean "annulate", but "accepting some degree of risk that can be controlled." Of course the downside of this cautiousness around zero-confirmation transactions causes people to think Bitcoin transactions are slow, when it's not true. They are as fast as, if not faster, than CC transactions.
• lmm 9y ago
  > The "commit time" (time until a transaction is considered irreversible) is 60 days for Visa, but 10-60 minutes for Bitcoin. The "notification time" (time until a transaction is announced to recipient) is < 1 second for both systems. The "processed time" (time until a received transaction is spendable) is next-business-day for Visa, and 10 minutes for Bitcoin. You can draw all sorts of gerrymandered lines to make different things sound equivalent. The question that matters for a merchant is how long do they have to wait to confirm a transaction in order to not end up losing massive amounts of money to fraud, and that number is <1 second for visa and 10-60 minutes for Bitcoin. > Bitcoin miners consume less energy than the annual electricity consumption of decorative Christmas lights in the US, which process 0 transactions and do nothing other than looking shiny: http://blog.zorinaq.com/bitcoin-electricity-consumption/ http://blog.zorinaq.com/bitcoin-electricity-consumption/ Only because Christmas lights are used by more people, more often. How much energy does bitcoin consume per transaction, hmm? > (1) senders/recipients who needs to send/receive money quickly (10-60 minutes) to/from anybody around the world Obviously no-one wants to wait any longer than they have to, but what's the realistic use case where the participants are far enough apart that this matters and 10-60 minutes is so much better than a couple of days? And again this is a case where bitcoin could very easily be undercut in the near future by trustful systems that have fundamentally much lower costs - within-country those systems are already single-digit minutes (2 hours is advertised but that's an upper limit, bitcoin has a very high upper limit on how long a transaction might take). > (2) recipients who want to eradicate fraudulent and eventually reversed payments Irreversible payment is too easy to exploit in the other direction, by selling faulty goods. Non-criminal consumers like the option of chargebacks, and non-criminal merchants accept that.
  • mrb 9y ago
    "You can draw all sorts of gerrymandered lines to make different things sound equivalent" They are equivalent. I note that you failed to make a detailed rebuttal, and that is because the factual data I mentioned is true. "Only because Christmas lights are used by more people, more often. How much energy does bitcoin consume per transaction, hmm?" It's neither about the number of users, nor about the energy per tx. My point was that people are OK to spend energy on things that are seemingly useless (shiny colorful lights, or SHA256 computation.) And in both cases, Xmas lights or Bitcoin mining, it's fine to spend the energy doing so. Because what we get in return (comfort of life, economic product) is worth the energy spent on it. So if people are OK spending 7 TWh/year on technically useless decorative lights, it is obviously OK to spend a similar amount of energy on powering a revolutionary distributed trustless financial network. Every kWh spent on Bitcoin mining not only enables transactions, but also: creates jobs, creates wealth, reduces trade friction, improves economic output, and on and on. "what's the realistic use case where the participants are far enough apart that this matters and 10-60 minutes is so much better than a couple of days?" Seriously? If you can't answer this question, you have never run a company (even a small company) who engages in international trade. "Non-criminal consumers like the option of chargebacks, and non-criminal merchants accept that." And yet reversibility hampers trade. Some business is never done with reversible CC transactions precisely because merchants can't accept the risk. Bitcoin enables them to pursue ventures that would otherwise not be doable.