Banks cannot clear transactions more rapidly than Bitcoin. Waiting a few seconds and confirming that most nodes on the network have received the bitcoin transa

Banks cannot clear transactions more rapidly than Bitcoin. Waiting a few seconds and confirming that most nodes on the network have received the bitcoin transaction is safe enough for most transactions (those involving values less than $100) to be considered cleared. Waiting 1 hour makes transactions with values in the tens of thousands of dollars safe to consider cleared. These transactions can be done 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. In contrast, bank transactions can only be cleared during bank operating hours. For international wire transfers, it's usually necessary to physically visit a bank branch too. When the average wait time of waiting for banks to open and the time it takes to physically arrive at a bank teller's counter is added up, it's much longer than the maximum 1 hour one would wait for a very large bitcoin transaction to clear. The actual transfer of funds sent in an international wire transfer usually takes several hours or days too, so it can be reversed without the cooperation of the receiving bank long after the funds have been credited to the receiving party's account, within that window of time. The time it takes for a transfer of funds from the sending bank to the receiving bank to cleared is analogous to the one hour wait for six confirmations that one would wait for extremely large bitcoin transactions, so really, even under the worst conditions (when banks are open and the person is already physically at the bank branch and when six confirmations are needed for a very large bitcoin transaction), Bitcoin is much faster than traditional banking. " Bitcoin does not meet the formal definition of security and there is a known polynomial time attack on Bitcoin" When you discover a way to create a provably safe decentralized digital currency, please let us know. Bitcoin is the best that is possible given the features it has.