5 ms·

> Only if you wait for a significant amount of time (days?) to verify the transaction. What? Two or three confirmations are generally irreversible. Six - an ho

> Only if you wait for a significant amount of time (days?) to verify the transaction. What? Two or three confirmations are generally irreversible. Six - an hour, give or take - has been generally agreed to be absolutely irreversible since the original Bitcoin client (if it's not, there's something really wrong and Bitcoin isn't as valuable as we thought). If you're using a payment processor which takes risk that doesn't need to be there because you're not going to have your items in the post in an hour anyway (i.e. the vast majority of merchants), you're simply wasting money.

grey-area 13y ago
Credit cards generally verify in seconds, so this is a significant difference, even if the time is hours (I'd read somewhere it could be days for 7 confirmations, but thanks for the correction if that is never true and it is hours) - that confirmation time varies wildly and is not predictable is also an issue. A lot of merchants ship almost immediately after orders are completed (e.g. digital goods), so introducing another delay is not great and a significant downside for both merchants and consumers. These and other technical challenges like blockchain size are probably soluble though, esp. if it hit scale and people were working on it, what worries me more in terms of mass adoption is the attitude to other risks like security, volatility and lack of insurance in the Bitcoin community, the insane requirements for sending in copies of passports etc that exchanges still have for purchasing bitcoins, and the fundamental problems caused by giving individual cryptographic keys perpetual value. It would certainly be nice to have a payment system not controlled by Visa/Mastercard, and I imagine one is coming, but I'm not convinced Bitcoin is that alternative because of the assumptions baked into its design that we need to exchange tokens in order to exchange value.
- vertex-four 13y ago
  > the insane requirements for sending in copies of passports etc that exchanges still have for purchasing bitcoins. If you've ever bought foreign currency in a bureau de change, you'll have had to provide ID. It's the same set of laws which require Bitcoin exchanges to require ID. Take it up with your Government.
- gnaritas 13y ago
  > Credit cards generally verify in seconds, so this is a significant difference Which is equivalent to a 0 confirmation transaction, so no it's not a difference. Cards can be reversed for months, that's what 6 confirmations is competing with.
  - grey-area 13y ago
    Which is equivalent to a 0 confirmation transaction, so no it's not a difference. The CC issuer is queried for the card status, funds available, address etc, and transactions are accepted or declined based on that information. Sometimes there's even an extra verification step directly contacting the issuers bank to check a passcode (SecureCode), and all that is reversible afterward if a mistake or fraud is detected. In what way is that analogous to a 0 confirmation irreversible bitcoin transaction?
    - gnaritas 13y ago
      Safety for the merchant. First off, funds don't need to be checked, there is not a card status or funds available, address is not necessary so all of those things are problems cards have that Bitcoin doesn't; they aren't relevant. It is just as safe to accept a 0 confirmation transaction as it is to accept a credit card. In both cases, the transaction could be essentially reversed either by a double spend or by a charge-back. And frankly, a charge-back is far more likely than a double spend. In both cases, the merchant is equally out. Bitcoin typically clears in less than an hour while cards don't clear for months. There is far more risk of a charge-back in months than there is of a double spend in the milliseconds it'd have to occur to be successful. Cards offer more safety to the consumer of a fraudulent vendor of course, but that's the nature of cash and that's when you use escrow if it's big enough to worry you. However, fraudulent customers are far more common than fraudulent vendors; it's the vendors who need the most protection here and it's the vendors the current system disfavors.
      - Nursie 13y ago
        >> Safety for the merchant. Sorry, but f*ck the merchant. We have thousands of years of history of consumers being ripped off by merchants. Laws and payment methods have spent the last few decades arranging themselves on the consumer's side and you want to rebalance evrything in favour of the people who have (historically and continually) been ripping the rest of us off? No thanks.

grey-area 13y ago

Credit cards generally verify in seconds, so this is a significant difference, even if the time is hours (I'd read somewhere it could be days for 7 confirmations, but thanks for the correction if that is never true and it is hours) - that confirmation time varies wildly and is not predictable is also an issue. A lot of merchants ship almost immediately after orders are completed (e.g. digital goods), so introducing another delay is not great and a significant downside for both merchants and consumers. These and other technical challenges like blockchain size are probably soluble though, esp. if it hit scale and people were working on it, what worries me more in terms of mass adoption is the attitude to other risks like security, volatility and lack of insurance in the Bitcoin community, the insane requirements for sending in copies of passports etc that exchanges still have for purchasing bitcoins, and the fundamental problems caused by giving individual cryptographic keys perpetual value. It would certainly be nice to have a payment system not controlled by Visa/Mastercard, and I imagine one is coming, but I'm not convinced Bitcoin is that alternative because of the assumptions baked into its design that we need to exchange tokens in order to exchange value.

vertex-four 13y ago
> the insane requirements for sending in copies of passports etc that exchanges still have for purchasing bitcoins. If you've ever bought foreign currency in a bureau de change, you'll have had to provide ID. It's the same set of laws which require Bitcoin exchanges to require ID. Take it up with your Government.
gnaritas 13y ago
> Credit cards generally verify in seconds, so this is a significant difference Which is equivalent to a 0 confirmation transaction, so no it's not a difference. Cards can be reversed for months, that's what 6 confirmations is competing with.
- grey-area 13y ago
  Which is equivalent to a 0 confirmation transaction, so no it's not a difference. The CC issuer is queried for the card status, funds available, address etc, and transactions are accepted or declined based on that information. Sometimes there's even an extra verification step directly contacting the issuers bank to check a passcode (SecureCode), and all that is reversible afterward if a mistake or fraud is detected. In what way is that analogous to a 0 confirmation irreversible bitcoin transaction?
  - gnaritas 13y ago
    Safety for the merchant. First off, funds don't need to be checked, there is not a card status or funds available, address is not necessary so all of those things are problems cards have that Bitcoin doesn't; they aren't relevant. It is just as safe to accept a 0 confirmation transaction as it is to accept a credit card. In both cases, the transaction could be essentially reversed either by a double spend or by a charge-back. And frankly, a charge-back is far more likely than a double spend. In both cases, the merchant is equally out. Bitcoin typically clears in less than an hour while cards don't clear for months. There is far more risk of a charge-back in months than there is of a double spend in the milliseconds it'd have to occur to be successful. Cards offer more safety to the consumer of a fraudulent vendor of course, but that's the nature of cash and that's when you use escrow if it's big enough to worry you. However, fraudulent customers are far more common than fraudulent vendors; it's the vendors who need the most protection here and it's the vendors the current system disfavors.
    - Nursie 13y ago
      >> Safety for the merchant. Sorry, but f*ck the merchant. We have thousands of years of history of consumers being ripped off by merchants. Laws and payment methods have spent the last few decades arranging themselves on the consumer's side and you want to rebalance evrything in favour of the people who have (historically and continually) been ripping the rest of us off? No thanks.