Hi bitcoin users

I found bitcoin yesterday, and I am really impressed by the idea of avoiding issuers/banks in a digital cash system.

However, I have one objection that I would like your view on.

That is the latency, or delay in a local transaction. Let us say that a payer and payee are located in the same city for example. I will claim, that they want a payment to go through
with a delay not much slower than the latency of network connections. With an issuer and using local coins (a prefix, say, can be used to localize a server of the issuer), the transaction should be done and verified in 100 microseconds or less. With a global p2p network, it is necessary to have all nodes receive the transaction, do some calculations and send results back.
It is not feasible,  with the speed of light as an upper limit, to do this faster than a second. As I understand it you actually use something like 10 minutes for one block, or even more for several block verifications. This means that verification of the absence of double spending is 10,000 or even tens of millions times too slow. This would get even worse in interplanetary trade of course.

The ideal payment system should be decentralized but also local, i.e., the verification of a local transaction must not have to wait for a light signal to travel to the other end of the "universe" and come back again.

Locality, in the sense describe here, is crucial, I will claim.

Sincerely,

Morten Krogh.