5 ms·
Instantly? I thought the transactions took an average 10min. Am I wrong?
by stinky613 9y ago
Instantly? I thought the transactions took an average 10min. Am I wrong?
- rocqua 9y agoIt depends. If you send me a signed transaction that spends some of your money, you can simply put that into the blockchain. The issue is that you might send multiple such transactions spending the same money. If I want to guard against others trying to spend the same money I have to wait until the transaction is a few blocks deep. Generally the advice is 6 blocks which should be about an hour.
- spookthesunset 9y agoIn other words, for any useful transaction... Bitcoin isn't instant at all.
- joshvm 9y agoDefine useful though. If you have to wait an hour to confirm an online order, is that a problem if the item won't ship for hours anyway? A bigger problem right now is that you pay whatever the current rate is. With the current volatility you could easily overspend or underspend by a large amount.
- j_s 9y agoSteam blamed volatility when they bailed yesterday. Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15863182 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15863182 > due to high fees and volatility in the value of Bitcoin
- iopq 9y agoBut 1 block is something like 99.9% safe. Even 0 blocks is somewhat safe, as long as you keep resubmitting the transaction and the other person doesn't spend those funds in an earlier block before yours gets included.
- j_s 9y agoHere's how it works out in practice for HN user jstanley's SaaS: https://smsprivacy.org/zeroconf-payments https://smsprivacy.org/zeroconf-payments > We've decided to start accepting 0-confirmation payments under certain conditions: > 1. The payment amount does not exceed 0.02 BTC. > 2. The total amount of pending unconfirmed payments across all users does not exceed 0.1 BTC.