BrokenPipe

You got that backwards, one of the two, Mike, suggested to that they should spend some time working on payment channel and improvements like lightning and since they though it was a good idea they did.

Blockstream has to benefit from blocks as large as possible without losing decentralisation and security properties, like everyone else.

I agree with your friend. Avoid Italy.

There's no good reason to open in Italy, especially when in EU you can open in many other places which are much cheaper and easier to deal with.

Link to the reddit discussion http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/28jozx/a_debit_card...

I think we did, good point.

It should be removed imho. Especially since the instant confirmation with a monitor couldn't really be synchronous without .. wait for it, waiting.

good catch!

To answer to your question, I think your points have already been raised and while I may even share them BIP70 is by default using SSL and X.509 and it seems natural to use it for extensions too.

Other than that, instant confirmation is also done via our own API (which is via wss, ssl) and there is no reason as to why it couldn't be done with ECDSA instead, issue as usual is key management.

You think arbitrage&liquidity between exchanges via instant confirmation is not well suited for exchanges?

cheers!

Not really, the payment protocol gives you back the full transaction that can be checked by the merchant.

The 'instant' comes from trusting a third party that temporarily controls enough keys to block the funds before they can get double spent but long enough that the tx can be confirmed.

I got distracted, sorry

I think fees will get cheaper as times goes by and the bitcoin network and market matures but it is very hard to say right now with the current transaction size limitations.

Bitcoin is still in early development and very niche, so far the incentives have been working well enough but once the block rewards halves is yet to be seen if fees will be competitive enough and whether the price for them will go up. We also have to hope that the block size and the network capacity can grow fast enough to support its own weight.

In general I think that as more players come in the industry the fees of exchanges, atms, debit cards etc will decrease.

I wish some core developer could also contribute to answer your question and provide more insight than i can offer.

We don't provide instant confirmation but that does not mean you can't spend your funds without it.

The minimum is 1 day or 144 blocks, default to 90 days, max is max block size.

Do you think the banking industry will support the unbanked faster than a stable and accessible internet will reach them?

We only provide instant confirmations for bitcoins we know that are going to get included in a block long before the nlocktime will expire allowing you to spend them.

An ATM bitcoin to cash manufacturer is testing the functionality right now and another one is planning to integrate it when they implement the payment protocol.

There's also other users that can check either inside the GreenAddress wallet or at https://greenaddress.it/instant

it's called GreenAddress because when I thought about the concept, end of 2012 beginning of 2013 it wasn't yet associated with the bad reputation or MtGox double spends and I felt anyhow that it could be improved (which I think we did).

The modus operandi of the platform is different from the original GreenAddress concept as the instant confirmation comes out of band and is based on multisignature allowing the system to prevent users double spends.

However, like the original GreenAddress concept, it is based on third party trust, there is no magic bullet.

reminds me of this comment on reddit

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/284me8/instant_conf...

Not to dismiss the 51% issue but that would affect all transactions, this -'instant protocol' is on top of bitcoin, not in replacement of.

For the record I know HostFat does not have an iPhone and he is a friend. I think.

Hello:)

Author of the BIP draft for the Instant Confirmation Payment Protocol aka BIP70 extension and founder of GreenAddress.

You can find the draft here https://github.com/greenaddress/bips/blob/bip-payment-reques...

Bitcoin dev mailing list discussion http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.bitcoin.devel/5628

Reddit discussion http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/284me8/instant_conf...

The aim of this extension is to reduce risk by allowing, via a third party, instant confirmation of bitcoin transactions.

Questions, comments and in general any feedback is very welcome!

Cheers! Lawrence

Hello :) author of the proposal here, if you have any question or comment feel free to ask!

Users that trust https://GreenAddress.it can check the instant confirmation inside their wallet (on a UI 'badge' similar to the N confirmations or unconfirmed).

While some platforms are interested in the instant confirmation some will take longer or won't.

For this reason and for external wallet users you can still manually check if a specific transaction is instant via https://greenaddress.it/instant provided that you are the recipient of the transaction and can prove it - and of course that you trust GreenAddress to not allow users to double spend.

The external instant confirmation link does not work for multisig or P2SH external addresses yet.

Link to the reddit discussion http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/284me8/instant_conf...

Cheers!

Lawrence

impressive! a very cool hack!

true. if you want to try a wallet that offers multisig via 2fa, which should protects you more from the above risk, you may want to give https://greenaddress.it a go.

I've put a warning that suggests to users to use a local app!

Sure, I posted the design document/'white paper' here:

http://blog.greenaddress.it/2014/04/05/firstpost-updates/

Direct pdf link:

http://ghgreenaddress.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/greenaddre...

disclaimer, I'm the founder of GreenAddress ;)

2of2 with time locked transactions means you can prevent double spend and thus allow instant confirmation.

the android app doesn't update by default and the chrome app doesn't update if installed from github but otherwise you are right although the web client remains useful for watch only mode (no keys) or for small amount

these two local and open source wallet clients also verify data before signing against the electrum network.

we are also working on our api, plugins for popular open source wallets (including hardware) and a full Java desktop client using bitcoinj.

we also worked hard to make all user transactions non correlatable to users or us (instant confirmation is out of band) and are working on a bunch of interesting things on top of it

Earthians, gaians, world citizens ;)

Including me.

Have you seen https://greenaddress.it?

Multisignature, deterministic, open source

Bitpay uses 0 confirmation and listens to the network before accepting payments but as you say this is may prove to not be sufficient.

Direct link to the document, in pdf http://ghgreenaddress.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/greenaddre...