C why would it take an hour to verfiy a transaction, credit cards are verified in seconds, is it due to the volume of 70k mostly satoshidice transactions? If btc starts to have millions of transactions what impact would that have on the 6 verification hops needed to verify? Only 70k trans now most days and its almost an hour, at 1m trans what would 6 verifications take in time?
On the Bitcoin network a Bitcoin transaction happens within seconds. It is just as fast or faster than a VISA transaction.
By the design of the Bitcoin protocol, the average time for one
confirmation is 10 minutes. This is an average so sometimes it is less than 10 minutes, sometimes it is longer than 10 minutes. In fact due to a constantly increasing difficulty and hash rate the average confirmation time has been less than 10 mintues for quite a while now.
The more confirmation you have for your instant transaction the more certain you are that it cannot be reversed. If you trust the party giving you the funds, trust that they will not reverse the transaction, then you can accept the transaction within seconds - as fast or faster than VISA (and a lot less expensive).
Some businesses wait for 3 confirmation, some wait for 6 confirmation in order to be sure
the transaction cannot be reversed. Generally after 6 confirmations (about one hour on average) the transaction cannot be reversed, ever.
Let's compare that to VISA. How long do you have to wait until you are certain that a VISA transaction will not be reversed? 30 days? 90 days? 6 months? ONE YEAR? In fact, VISA transactions have been reversed
after more than one year.
So Bitcoin cannot be reversed after about one hour compared to VISA which can be reversed for one year or more.
What was your question again?