I am sorry, but I think everybody here is wrong in a way or the other, even bitcoinologist.

It all depends on the Use Case...

1) Online monetary transactions: Bitcoin RULES!
Bitcoin is faster than anything else that existed BEFORE (eg. paypal). I think anybody already agrees in that...
...BUT "faster" doesn't mean "instantaneous", bitcoinologist is right about that, instantaneous is "SECONDS" NOT "MINUTES". Here many bitcoiners blinded by lack of auto-critic or excess of love for the tool/currency are changing the meaning of "instantaneous" to avoid admitting that there is room for improvement in that area.


2) Online goods/services transactions: Bitcoin RULES!
Here is where I think bitcoinologist is wrong. Most, if not all, web services and web shops are don't deliver instantaneously. It is perfectly fine taking 10 minutes or an 1 hour to receive an email for a new DNS service that will have to propagate anyway, plane tickets, train tickets, goods that are going to be delivered later in the day, etc.
When the costumer clicks "buy", you just check the transaction when through and reply "Congratulations! your purchase was successful!"... which DOESN'T mean that you are NOT checking its confirmations on the background and can revert or suspend the goods or service delivery if anything wrong is detected 1 hour later.


3) "In person" transactions: Bitcoin is inconvenient most of the time.
Merchants of small goods/services cannot wait 10 minutes for 1 confirmation or 6h for a the proposed confirmations. Bitcoiners replies to this are unsatisfactory and a symptom of too much self-complacency on bitcoin and lack of auto-critic:

 - They say the merchant should risk the money cause it's unlikely that it will be lost. But again, the merchant could disagree, even if it does that with VISA. Cause in VISA at least both the buyer AND the VISA company are identified and the merchant could sue someone, while in bitcoin the money is lost and the buyer might not be identified most of the time. Imagine Carrefour or Walmart, for instance, they probably would never accept bitcoins due to fear of some hacker group coordinating an attack on their shops attacking it to steal lots of goods on a prepared coordinated fashion.

 - Others say that they could use a service provider, but that violates the philosophy that you can can be (if you prefer) your own service provider on all matters.

The facts remains that:

1- Bitcoin mining is what makes bitcoin so useful and successful BUT...

2- But at the same time, making all transactions speed depend on mining speed does not sound right.

3- Bitcoin potential success means scalability problems: most clients mobile phones already and soon PCs wont be able to keep up with the block chain size and growth traffic, so they will have to trust external providers... just like the ripple protocol consensus does.


My proposal, that none has taken a minute to tell me what they see wrong about it is:

Why doesn't bitcoin aim for a decentralized instant (meaning seconds) transactions like this?

A) At some point, a second blockchain is created, it can be linked hashed to a certain block. This new block chain does have very little to zero mining reward. Lets call it "the fast block chain or FTB".

B) The original block chain or OTB is untouched, it works just as it does now, maybe with smaller rewards to allocate the ones in the faster block chain.

C) Transactions can refer to outputs on both block chains.

D) The FTB could work like the OTB but using a mining cycle of 3 seconds instead of 10 minutes. Or, without mining, it could use a 3 seconds consensus algorithm just like in ripple to close a block.

E) Transaction fees on the FTB will be higher on the FTB than on the OTB (but don't need to be expensive) to reward FTB miners/servers.

F) Transaction load on the OTB will decrease, making small transactions that don't pay fees faster or even able to get through at all. (Imagine what would happen on an single unimproved bitcoin chain) to tiny transactions when handling thousands of tps, many won't get through for many, many blocks. Others may never get through cause there is always another more rewarding, even if its days/weeks/years younger.


And I don't buy the go to ripple then... Ripple weak spot for me is their lack of mining. One company created all the XRPs? I don't trust that. Mining is better than that, the problem is that what is good for mining may not be so good for "instantaneous decentralized transaction confirmation".