Ask HN: What was impossible earlier that is easy in the BTC and ETH blockchains?

Re:Ask HN: What was impossible earlier that is easy in the B... by ceejayoz on Friday June 30, 2017 @01:47PM (#14672408)

The average confirmation time for a Bitcoin transaction was 400+ minutes recently (and is still around an hour even now). https://blockchain.info/charts/avg-confirmation-time?daysAve...

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Re:Ask HN: What was impossible earlier that is easy in the B... by ryanlol on Friday June 30, 2017 @03:42PM (#14673191)

Yes, but you don't need more than 20-30 seconds to be confident that a transaction isn't a doublespend attempt.

After that it's only about checking if the fee is high enough.

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Re:Ask HN: What was impossible earlier that is easy in the B... by ceejayoz on Friday June 30, 2017 @04:50PM (#14673521)

> After that it's only about checking if the fee is high enough.

Which can take up to 72 hours, right?

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Re:Ask HN: What was impossible earlier that is easy in the B... by ryanlol on Friday June 30, 2017 @06:35PM (#14673970)

No, you just check if the fee per KB is more than x. Where x is a fee that is likely enough to confirm. This is practically instant.

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Re:Ask HN: What was impossible earlier that is easy in the B... by ceejayoz on Saturday July 01, 2017 @09:25AM (#14677009)

I'm not sure "likely enough to confirm" is going to go over all that well with many merchants, particularly when that chart shows the price-per-byte jumps all over the place rapidly.

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