Post
Topic
Board Speculation
Re: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion
by
Finski
on 27/11/2013, 21:45:11 UTC
Why aren't businesses adopting bitcoin payments like crazy? we really should start with this now. Amazon, get on with it. We have to make this sustainable and not reliable on the fragile human psychology.



Because its still actually shit as a simple currency. Check reddit story of guy who buys a burito and has to wait an hour for confirmations, ends up paying them fiat aswell just to get home.

Uh, 0-confirm transactions are just fine for small purchases. Vendors need to get on with the program.
Yeah, this is ridiculous.

There's actually a pretty simple way around this even for bigger transactions: A hardware wallet with an internal balance counter. The hardware wallet would prevent double/overspending and only incoming transactions confirmed by a trusted third party would be added to the internal balance counter. Whenever you'd pay with this hardware wallet the hw would sync the balance with the third party, if possible, and then sign the transaction and asymmetrically sign the transaction with a manufacturer provided private key (inorder to assure the receiver of the payment that this is indeed an authentic hw wallet made by the said manufacturer). This way the receiver of that transaction can check if both signatures are valid and, if so, he/she can be instantly certain that he will receive the coins. This would make offline transactions possible, too.

Of course this means that the private keys can only exist on that hw wallet. (Actually you could have another backup hw wallet which, if used, would revoke the manufacturer certified second signature. This could also be used to spend your coins in case the trusted third party should stop providing the confirmed incoming transaction data.)

All this would be possible without ever having to trust your coins to any third party online service... Basically like your average CC/debit card but better. I actually suggested this to Trezor but they seemed to have issues with understanding the concept.