Quote from: BitTrade on July 08, 2013, 05:18:40 AM

Quote from: Ira H. Fuchs on July 07, 2013, 09:57:50 PM

good day, What you are suggesting would require the user to trust the offchain operator. You need to reread Satoshis' white paper. Bitcoin was designed to not rely on trust, I works because I depends upon proof of work confirmations within the peer to peer CPU user pool. Any questions?..Ira

Off-chain solutions MUST complement on-chain transactions in order for Bitcoin to be mass adopted. It seems like many in the bitcoin community suffer from severe tunnel-vision, and have lost complete sight of the big picture.

What is bitcoin competing against? We are competing against government-issued currencies.

What can people do with government-issued currences that they can't do with bitcoin? They can exchange them INSTANTLY, and store them safely in a bank (3rd party).

In order to compete with the likes of PayPal, we need bitcoin to be as CONVENIENT as PayPal. Currently:

- Maintaining a secure bitcoin wallet has a higher level of difficulty than maintaining a PayPal account.
- Sending coins to a public key is more confusing than sending money to an e-mail address via PayPal.
- Waiting 10+ minutes for transactions to confirm is 10 minutes longer than PayPal transactions.

While the blockchain offers decentralization and pseudonymity, it must be complemented with off-chain solutions if we want people to be able to use bitcoins with the same ease as, say, US Dollars / PayPal.

I don't think any of the things you mention to compete with PayPal actually require off-chain transactions, although there are a lot of cases where they have a role.

Quote from: BitTrade on July 08, 2013, 05:18:40 AM

- Maintaining a secure bitcoin wallet has a higher level of difficulty than maintaining a PayPal account.

This can definitely be fixed with a trusted wallet service, and possibly even with some client design ingenuity.

Quote from: BitTrade on July 08, 2013, 05:18:40 AM

- Sending coins to a public key is more confusing than sending money to an e-mail address via PayPal.

This can be fixed with an email -> Bitcoin address directory with a public API. I made one called Address Machine:
https://www.addressmachine.com/

Quote from: BitTrade on July 08, 2013, 05:18:40 AM

- Waiting 10+ minutes for transactions to confirm is 10 minutes longer than PayPal transactions.

You have to wait 10+ minutes for transactions to be _irrevocably_ confirmed, but with PayPal the relevant number is more like 3 months. Most practical situations where you need instant transactions can probably get by with zero confirmations, although the issues around this aren't quite trivial. If zero-confirmation transactions _do_ turn out to be too risky in practice for widespread use, there are other ways of working around this without entrusting the whole payment process with a trusted off-chain third-party.