sebbyBinx
However, as Bitcoin's security inevitably weakens over the coming years due to diminishing miner rewards (denominated in BTC), I believe this "6-confimation" acceptance policy will change to include not only the number of confirmations, but the timing of those confirmations as well. Consider a scenario where an exchange deciding whether a tx with 6-confirmations that took 4 hours to arrive (this happens occasionally) is safe to consider finalized/settled. Even though 6-confimations may be considered safe by today's acceptance policies, this tx would still have a high probability of double spend due to the assumed 4-hour long wait for the 6 confirmations (as the attacker would have 4 hours to produce 7 blocks instead of the normal/expected 1 hour). Instead of ignoring block interarrival timing, it may make sense to include block timing as part of an acceptance policy.
So, going forward Bitcoin acceptance policies may change from today's 6-confirmation standard to something more complicated that involves the amount of time those blocks took to arrive. This would significantly enhance Bitcoin's double spending resistance without adding/altering any code and may give the network a much needed security boost in the coming years to prevent the attack discussed in the post.
Digital assets will have their place alongside gold and diamonds in jewelry, and perhaps even entirely replace them.
A significant issue with gold and diamonds in jewelry is that the value is destroyed if the jewelry is lost or stolen. However, Bitcoin and other digital assets do not have this issue since a pointer to the value can be worn, not the value itself.
I made a site which promotes this idea in an open way: thebtcring.com
https://www.engadget.com/2015-05-21-a-bitcoin-engagement-rin...
Accepting transactions blindly after 5 confirmations/blocks throws away the information of the amount of time it takes to generate those blocks