Re:Ask HN: For Bitcoin to be ubiquitous, what must happen?
by celticninja on Sunday November 17, 2013 @04:37PM
(#6751032)
if you only require 1 confirmation, and for a coffee or lunch this should be fine, which would take perhas 10 minutes at most.
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Re:Ask HN: For Bitcoin to be ubiquitous, what must happen?
by ceejayoz on Sunday November 17, 2013 @04:41PM
(#6751053)
Waiting 10 minutes for your coffee payment to go through?
Pitch that to Starbucks and see how far you get.
Re:Ask HN: For Bitcoin to be ubiquitous, what must happen?
by celticninja on Friday November 29, 2013 @11:15AM
(#6819912)
sorry i meant that for coffee you dont need to wait for a confirmation, a zero confirmation transaction for $5 is safe enough, no one is going to bother to double spend against that as the computational power required means it is not economical to do so. Zero conf transactions are almost instantaneous
Re:Ask HN: For Bitcoin to be ubiquitous, what must happen?
by PeterisP on Sunday November 17, 2013 @05:04PM
(#6751175)
Some years ago I saw a comms infrastructure upgrade project for a small local retailer chain, connecting all their POS terminals to a proper network. Did they have any plans to implement a smart POS system? Nope, their only reason for quite sizeable investment was to reduce the time to swipe a creditcard by the 5-10 seconds that the old solution (in essence, modems on a phoneline) spent to estabilish the connection to the card processor.
My point? The proper measurement unit for payment latency is seconds, no matter if you're shopping online or at a store.
If it's in minutes or hours, then it might as well be batch-processing of bills with settlement on the next business day.