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> A: We've created a decentralized accounting system and currency that obviates the need for most of the standard accounting controls and fraud prevention measu

• dscrd 13y ago
  Perhaps you are not aware that actually settling credit card payments, i.e. the time it takes for the money to actually end up in the merchant's bank account may take several days, even weeks. As for bitcoin, to my knowledge this is pretty much analoguous to "transaction confirmation", which typically happens in 10 minutes. So it's actually much much faster than credit card payments.
  • wavefunction 13y ago
    You just hand-waved away the fact that the trust necessary for an independent retailer to accept an "untrusted" credit-card has been aggregated in Visa and MasterCard and codified through tort law and agreements with the aforementioned credit-card companies. What are you going to do, provide a detailed transaction history to the retailer proving that "your bitcoin transactions always are legit?" Kind of removes the last of the "anonymity" afforded by Bitcoin.
    • dcosson 13y ago
      It's normally a matter of seconds until other clients can see a bitcoin transaction that you've posted for the network. The only way that will end up not being legit is if you've double-spent the funds - that won't happen if you're a legit user using a regular client, and for the most part even for a nefarious user it would require significant computing resources (e.g. you've already mined a block spending those coins but won't release it until you walk out of the store). So the idea is that if you're a regular retail store, accepting unconfirmed transactions is fine. Unless a big exploit becomes known, any fraud you might happen to see certianly won't any higher than the credit card chargebacks you're getting now. If you're selling your house, you probably want to wait for a few block confirmations. Not to mention there are other crypto-currencies with significantly faster block clearing times, and cryptocoin to cryptocoin exchanges are significantly easier to run than bitcoin to fiat exchanges. So it really seems like all of this is only a minor inconvenience for bitcoin if anything. And there's certainly no reason to ever have to trust someone because "they've been legit in the past", that's an approximation of trust that previous systems have had to rely on but exactly what bitcoin avoids.
      • wavefunction 13y ago
        You outlined a couple of scenarios where a transaction can be fraudulent, which is more than the 0 acceptable to a small business where margins are razor-thin already. You really expect every mom and pop store to accept Bitcoins when they have to be as technically literate as the posters of HN?
        • etherael 13y ago
          that won't happen if you're a legit user using a regular client, and for the most part even for a nefarious user it would require significant computing resources (e.g. you've already mined a block spending those coins but won't release it until you walk out of the store). Just in case he's not making it clear from the description of what actually doing that would involve, mining a block is a big deal. You're talking about winning the lottery in competition with 35 million other gigahash/sec worth of mining power. If the worst you want to do with that block is defraud a mom and pop store that accepts bitcoin you're positing a scenario something on the order of a multimillion dollar operation in order to undertake such an attempt. If you're going to do that, you're not going to try to defraud the corner store for a snickers bar. Also, if that's genuinely not enough; Not to mention there are other crypto-currencies with significantly faster block clearing times, and cryptocoin to cryptocoin exchanges are significantly easier to run than bitcoin to fiat exchanges. Plenty of 60 second block confirm altcoin chains out there, no reason to use bitcoin if you absolutely insist on some way to address the double spend "problem".
          • jedunnigan 13y ago
            So having a miner in your pocket is certainly one way to execute a double spend. That's a Finney attack.[0] The other and less costly way is all about node connectivity.[1] If you are going to execute a double spend all you 'need' to do is broadcast two txs spending the same output at the same time--one going to the merchant the other spending it back to yourself--and cross your fingers and hope the double spend gets put in a block. Now, you can increase the probability (e.g. shielding the merchant's node from your double spend) of success but it's not a sure bet. And the higher the node connectivity of the network (i.e. how many nodes are each node connected to) the harder this attack becomes. There has been some work in this area, especially in pursuit of the efficacy of double spend attacks in light of some minor changes to the protocol which (I think) were rolled into core with the most release 0.9.0.[2] It's about .09% probability of success. [0]https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Weaknesses#The_Finney_attack https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Weaknesses#The_Finney_attack [1]http://www.tik.ee.ethz.ch/file/49318d3f56c1d525aabf7fda78b23fc0/P2P2013_041.pdf http://www.tik.ee.ethz.ch/file/49318d3f56c1d525aabf7fda78b23... [2]http://www.tik.ee.ethz.ch/file/848064fa2e80f88a57aef43d7d5956c6/P2P2013_093.pdf http://www.tik.ee.ethz.ch/file/848064fa2e80f88a57aef43d7d595...
  • chockablock 13y ago
    >settling credit card payments ... may take several days, even weeks. But there is a trusted 3rd party (the issuing bank) that gives an instant reply as to whether the purchaser's account has enough funds (or credit) to make the purchase, and assumes much of the risk if they are wrong and the purchaser is uncollectible. Maybe they don't need to take 2-5% of each transaction to provide this service, but it does seem like a pure, anonymous bitcoin transaction can not provide this service to a retailer.
    • LyndsySimon 13y ago
      There is no need for this service with Bitcoin - the balance controlled by every address in the network is known to everyone.
      • chockablock 13y ago
        I was referring to the fact that credit card companies prevent (or at least take responsibility for) double-spending.
  • patrickk 13y ago
    > "...which typically happens in 10 minutes..." Which is too long when waiting at a counter in a retail scenario. Imagine if every customer had to wait around for 10 minutes to verify the transaction, it would be chaos in a busy retail situation (even 1 minute is way too long), which is the point being raised by the GP comment. The merchant might have to wait weeks to actually receive payment from a credit card company, but at least they know they will eventually get paid, as Visa or whoever is a trusted entity. Bitcoin is 'trustless', so if the customer can leave as soon as they like, the merchant might confirm the transaction in 10 minutes, or they might not get paid at all.
    • canvia 13y ago
      Try buying something with bitcoin. The first confirmation is all that is needed and it happens in a matter of seconds. It won't be fully confirmed for ~10 minutes but that is fine for the vast majority of cases.
    • throwaway2048 13y ago
      the wont get paid by Visa if there is a chargeback, indeed they will owe some percentage extra as a processing fee.
• ufmace 13y ago
  It's been covered lots of times, but essentially, for all transactions whose value is an order of magnitude less than the current block reward, it is considered safe to complete the physical transaction as soon as the Bitcoin transaction arrives at the retailer's system through the Bitcoin network. This usually takes 5-15 seconds, so about the same amount of time as most credit card approvals take now. This is considered safe because even though there are various tricks you can pull with no confirmations, the hashpower needed to do any of them is so great that you would make far more money turning that hashpower towards legitimate mining than by scamming retailers. With Bitcoin value, block rewards, and hashrates as they are now, this means that anything less expensive then a car or a boat is okay to complete immediately. Waiting up to an hour for a couple of confirmations for a purchase of $10k or higher doesn't sound like too big of a deal.
  • wdewind 13y ago
    Why does the order of magnitude/size of transaction matter in terms of knowing if a transaction is safe? Do larger transactions take more time to verify? Thanks for answering, appreciate it - stuff like this is surprisingly difficult to google for.
    • ufmace 13y ago
      All transactions take basically the same time to verify. The trick is more in the motivations of any potential attackers. The heart of the Bitcoin system is the block confirmation system. Once a transaction has been accepted into a block and that block becomes part of the official blockchain, it becomes essentially impossible to perform any kind of scam or attack on that transaction, such as spending those coins somewhere else. Only one spend of a particular quantity of bitcoins can be in the blockchain at once, so any attempt to spend them again will be rejected. The trouble is that this is relatively slow. Getting one confirmation on a transaction takes probably like 5 minutes on average, and could vary depending essentially on the luck of the mining network at that moment. Using 6 confirmation is the official recommendation, and this may be expected to take about 1hr. It isn't necessary to use the official recommendation, though. It's always hard to attack the system, and the 6 confirmation point is where it becomes essentially impossible for even major governments to attack the system, but such strong security is not necessary on all transactions. So the question becomes, how hard do we need to make it for a particular transaction? To guess at that, we have to look at attacks. I mentioned earlier completing the physical transaction after the initial arrival of a Bitcoin transaction through the P2P Bitcoin network, before any blocks confirming it come in. To do a double-spend in that scenario, you would put 2 transactions spending the same coins on the network, and arrange for one to hit the vendor's system, while the other went out to the rest of the network and would be included in the next block. That's tough to arrange though - who knows what nodes the vendor is connected to, and it's impossible to know which miner will produce the next block. To have a solid chance at pulling this attack off, you would have to run a very powerful miner yourself, solve a block with a transaction spending some of your coins before another miner solved a block, then hold back that block, and perform your transaction at the target vendor between when you solved that block that you are holding and when another miner does. That's a window of a could of minutes, maybe, and it could take days or weeks or longer for your miner to solve a block that puts you in the position to do this. The timing is very tough to pull off at a physical store, then. And to do all of this, you have to be running your own independent miner, which is powerful enough to have a reasonable chance at solving a block in the next couple of weeks. But just running that miner as a normal miner means you're likely to get the mined block reward, currently 25 bitcoins, currently worth $12,500, just for solving that block. Why pull the funny business with transactions for, say, a $10 sandwich when you just made over 1000 times that money by doing nothing? So because of this, completing physical transactions after only a receipt of the Bitcoin transaction is a risk, but given the high difficulty and low reward to the attacker, and low loss amount to the business, it seems like a very acceptable risk to make the purchase process more convenient to the normal customers.