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There's two ways of interpreting "online payments" here. Through the lens of ACH/wire payments, your point is spot on. However, I suspect the author meant Venm

There's two ways of interpreting "online payments" here. Through the lens of ACH/wire payments, your point is spot on. However, I suspect the author meant Venmo/Paypal etc.; that's certainly how I interpreted the sentence. I'd argue that those services are better comparisons for P2P payments, especially in the US, where most consumers are not able or inclined to give out their bank information to receive an ACH payment. Compared to those incumbent online P2P payment services, Bitcoin really is starting to lag behind in that regard.

yellowapple 9y ago
"However, I suspect the author meant Venmo/Paypal etc." And my remark is still applicable there, since they're basically just frontends to the traditional ACH/wire payment system (at least in the case of Paypal; I haven't used Venmo much, so I'm not as familiar with how it works). Unless Paypal is paying the seller before receiving actual funds from the buyer, I'm not really seeing how this would be any different of a situation.
- theptip 9y ago
  Well, in that case I disagree with your point ;) From a user's perspective, the transaction is confirmed when the app says "transaction confirmed", i.e. the second you press the "send money" button. I think that's what the OP was getting at. As you correctly point out, the transaction could still bounce if the user has insufficient funds, but that's not in the happy path. Most users' experience with Venmo/Paypal is that they get a "confirmation" immediately, and then they move on. The happy path for a BTC transaction involves minutes to hours of time without even getting a _provisional_ ACK from the network, at any point in which your payment could fail and require a retry, or the payor could cancel. (The time taken to finalize the payment is much less with BTC, but since modern payment systems paper over that detail, I argue it is not relevant to the user-facing concern that the OP is commenting on. Perhaps it is something that users _should_ be more concerned about, but consider the use-case of trying to buy a cup of coffee with BTC. Nobody is going to wait 2 hours for a transaction to complete in that use-case.)

yellowapple 9y ago

"However, I suspect the author meant Venmo/Paypal etc." And my remark is still applicable there, since they're basically just frontends to the traditional ACH/wire payment system (at least in the case of Paypal; I haven't used Venmo much, so I'm not as familiar with how it works). Unless Paypal is paying the seller before receiving actual funds from the buyer, I'm not really seeing how this would be any different of a situation.

theptip 9y ago
Well, in that case I disagree with your point ;) From a user's perspective, the transaction is confirmed when the app says "transaction confirmed", i.e. the second you press the "send money" button. I think that's what the OP was getting at. As you correctly point out, the transaction could still bounce if the user has insufficient funds, but that's not in the happy path. Most users' experience with Venmo/Paypal is that they get a "confirmation" immediately, and then they move on. The happy path for a BTC transaction involves minutes to hours of time without even getting a _provisional_ ACK from the network, at any point in which your payment could fail and require a retry, or the payor could cancel. (The time taken to finalize the payment is much less with BTC, but since modern payment systems paper over that detail, I argue it is not relevant to the user-facing concern that the OP is commenting on. Perhaps it is something that users _should_ be more concerned about, but consider the use-case of trying to buy a cup of coffee with BTC. Nobody is going to wait 2 hours for a transaction to complete in that use-case.)