Re: bitcoin is failing in replacing fiat in physical shops

Quote from: enuma on February 16, 2014, 07:53:15 PM

Worldcoin is also fast when cames to confirmations. Only 30 secs.

It has its downs sides, faster confirmations contribute into having bigger mining pools, since joining the bigger one is advantegious because you will have less blocks being created as orphans.

I will be revealing a proposal of how to keep pools small.

Quote from: toknormal on February 16, 2014, 07:33:36 PM

Quote from: AnonyMint on February 16, 2014, 06:30:08 PM

We can build services that operate on the block chain without needing store funds in an account for those services

If thats the case, why don't any of the exchanges do this ? Not one single cryptocurrency exchange anywhere in the world uses the blockchain for any of its trades.

Even Coinbase doesn't do it if it can avoid it. Watch this video - you'll see demonstrated how incredibly easy it is to do account-to-account transactions as opposed to blockchain-based ones. The presenter even demonstrates sending bitcoin to **email addresses ** when the receiver doesn't have a blockchain address.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOoffwOJbY8

Cool idea to virally spread Bitcoin adoption by sending via email. Realize that when sending BTC via coinbase via email, anyone who can access the email can access the BTC, thus a wallet could just send the private key in the email too, even hide it in HTML with

to https website which accomplishes the same thing but stores the private key locally on the computer with the option to back up keys by printing and memory card. There might need to be a browser plugin to be installed for the wallet to allow to write to the local hard disk.

I don't see anything on the coinbase user interface in that video that couldn't be accomplished just as easily and seamlessly with the keys stored locally and all activities being recorded in the block chain. The only extra hassle for local storage is doing your own backups, but you gain anonymity and you can prevent all your balance from being stolen by malware by keeping most of your balance on paper.

He claims in the video that Coinbase holds the private keys. He claims Blockchain.info does not hold the private keys in an online database but I haven't verified it.

Coinbase keeps 95% of the private keys off line. They bring more online as needed during heavy demand for liquidity. Yet that 5% pool is apparently shared between all users. Malware could still record your coinbase login and spend your entire balance.

A user could do similarly, they wouldn't want to keep all their BTC private keys on their computer which is connected to the internet due to fear of malware stealing it.

One might argue that the safest would be to never use memory card either, and instead only print and re-type private keys from paper. Because malware can spread via USB drives too. However that is not true in this case, since the purpose is not to use the memory card in the interim time rather only to store it and reinsert when ready to spend the balance. Nevertheless I would also print, since memory cards can fail and malware could potentially delete it as soon as you reinserted it. So you would normally not have to retype, but keep these for the worst case scenario. At some point, I would like to look into if there is a way to create a memory card interface that can't transfer executable malware.