Quote from: toknormal on February 15, 2014, 01:30:10 PM

There are so many examples which spring to mind if you've ever worked in a retail operation. Here's another one of the top of my head - a hardware retailer takes an order from a known customer with an account.

As soon as we're talking about customers with accounts, we're no longer in the same ballpark as the original post. I don't have an account at every place I buy coffee. I shouldn't need to. I don't have an account at the three supermarkets I use. If they want me to carry their loyalty card(s), that's up for negotiation. This stuff is clearly a layer on top of Bitcoin, and it clearly should be optional, only used where it adds value.

Quote from: BittBurger on February 15, 2014, 03:28:42 PM

No. This would not require or imply "printing Bitcoins out of thin air".

I think the idea is that often when you have an account, you don't have bitcoins any more. You have an IOU for bitcoins. There is a number of coins that you owe to the account, or it owes to you, and these can exist only in the account records, not in the block chain. The off-chain transactions are not subject to the same public scrutiny. For example, some people are concerned that MtGox have been indulging in fractional reserve banking. I don't think they have, but it's hard to prove without access to their internal accounts.

Personally I think FRB will inevitably happen sooner or later with bitcoin, for better or for worse.

Quote from: franky1 on February 15, 2014, 06:31:21 PM

in the near future what will happen is that you will put a pocketmoney amount into a bitpay/coinbase account and simply tell the cashier to debit your account for the total. this way the coins are verified (as they have been preconfirmed when u deposited) and is faster then the cashier getting a QR code, printing it, showing it to you and then you fiddling around with your phone to pay them.

this will be done simply by a nfc in your phone coded to you bitpay/coinbase account.

You need to separate the "faster because of NFC" from the "faster because of payment processor". There's no reason why NFC can't be used for on-chain transactions. People are only using QR because it's currently more widely supported. Bitcoin isn't tied to QR codes.

Quote from: Sheldor333 on February 15, 2014, 10:54:48 PM

Yeah I never understood how confirmation can be so slow when bitcoin has so much mining power.

The slowness is required as part of the "proof of work", which is at the core of Bitcoin's security design against double-spending. When the mining power increases, the protocol deliberately makes mining harder so it doesn't get any faster.

Other crypto-currencies use other times than 10 minutes. In practice using 5 minutes or even 1 minute doesn't help as much as you'd expect, because it's still too long to wait in retail. It has a downside in that it leads to more resources wasted on discarded blocks.