Quote from: jav on August 31, 2011, 04:15:49 PM

Quote from: bansal on August 31, 2011, 02:10:15 PM

Bottom line is this, ten minutes is too long. If you want to just keep trading these things among yourselves fine, if you want these to actually be widely used in the real world this problem has to be solved. And no I'm not letting anyone walk off with my stuff with zero confirmations, or even just one confirmation. And my customer isn't going to sit there for an hour to wait to leave with the stuff he's trying to buy. Bitcoin with 10 minute confirmations is a niche currency for certain internet transactions, at best.

Are you just stating this as a general problem or are you suggesting that SolidCoin solves/helps with this problem? SolidCoin has 3 minutes between blocks, right? I don't see how that makes much of a difference. The thing is, you still need to take variance into account. Sure, on average you have a block every 3 minutes. But that means that for a 95 % chance of finding a block, you need to wait about 9 minutes (math here: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=-log%281-0.95%29%2F%281%2F3minutes%29 ). Which in turn means, that in 5 % of the cases you actually have to wait even longer than 9 minutes. So what have we really gained?

Sure, there might be situations where "wait for a little while" (SolidCoin) is acceptable whereas "wait for quite some time" (Bitcoin) would not be. But I can't think of that many situations to see this as much of an advantage.

It's a general problem. I give credit to CoinHunter for trying to solve the problem at least, but I'm not sure it's the right/best solution. It's just something the community needs to think about. I would love to see this solved in Bitcoin rather than a fork, but if it takes a fork then so be it. At the very least the forks are sparking some debate and possibly leading to improvements.

If you're walking into a store you're going to expect verification in less than a minute, that's what you get with credit cards or cash. Ten minutes plus isn't going to work. If I take an order over the phone, pretty much same deal. The only situation it would work is where I take an order over the internet and ship it the next day. I have even taken orders over the internet late in the day and quickly packed an order and dropped it off at UPS to try to provide good service, that would even be tough to do.