5 ms·
It's also impossible to charge recurring fees, and unlike Paypal etc, transactions take at least 10 minutes on average to clear (and around an hour if you want
by sltkr 14y ago
It's also impossible to charge recurring fees, and unlike Paypal etc, transactions take at least 10 minutes on average to clear (and around an hour if you want a decent amount of security).
For TorGuard that is probably acceptable, but in situations where you want to give your customers immediate access to your service, it's far from ideal.
- rictic 14y agoIf you're giving someone access to a service that you can revoke (e.g. web hosting, VPN, etc), it doesn't seem like there's any practical risk in optimistically giving someone access once you see the spend hit the bitcoin network. It's not infeasible to do that in a matter of seconds. If you're shipping something physical you're not going to be working on a timescale less than an hour anyways. Really the only time that I see Bitcoin's transaction processing speed being an issue is when you're doing a moderate to large transaction where waiting around would be inconvenient.
- cookiecaper 14y agoSomeone can chain fake btc transactions to your system granting themselves an infinite supply of access on short-lived accounts if you accept an immediate validation.
- zhoutong 14y agoNo one can ever fake transactions out of thin air. Bitcoin is cryptography. The requirement for confirmation is due to possible double spending, which will cost far more than a VPN account to do it successfully (to cheat a 0-confirmation system).
- rictic 14y agoYes. A reliable double spend attack would require many millions of dollars worth of machines, and would be noticeable and verifiable (you could provably say "hey I just got a double spend from this account for this amount"). This means that you're unlikely to get the money in that case (depending on what the community wanted to do in response) but you could reasonably expect to know if people are issuing double spends. I don't think it is in the interest of miners (the ones who have already invested, in sum, millions in mining machines) to collude for double spends except on incredibly valuable transactions, as it would undermine the value of Bitcoin, which they are profiting from and have significant investment in.
- scalable 14y agoThis is a problem that can easily be dealt with if/when it arises.
- ehsanu1 14y agoBuying a download is another case - can't revoke that.
- rictic 14y agoTrue, there's something of a tradeoff to make there in terms of waiting vs risk. This is the case with existing payment systems to some extent as well, isn't it? Blizzard for example recently took some heat with regard to fully activating digital downloads of Diablo 3, saying that it typically takes around a day, but may take as long as 72 hours. Speculation was that this was a response to spammers fraudulently buying short-lived accounts (perhaps with stolen credit card numbers, or issuing chargebacks). 1] http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2012/06/diablo-iii-digital-purchases-can-be-limited-for-up-to-72-hours/ http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2012/06/diablo-iii-digital-pur...
- joering2 14y agoyes, but PayPal is so huge that ripping off customers here or there is not a big deal to them. Hopefully they will answer a wakeup call when Square and Dwalla will continue to rise the way they are right now. I learnt to respect someone accepting bitCoint online, especially after dealing with PayPal for last 6 years. If I have to chose, I use bitcoins, and 10 minutes is not a big deal to wait; no worries!