Just a FYI: Litecoin does NOT confirm faster than bitcoins. Based on how the core bitcoin protocol works (which litecoin does not alter), a halving in confirmation time is also a halving in reliability of the confirmation.
Coinbase hires Charlie Lee, creator of Litecoin
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Re: Coinbase hires Charlie Lee, creator of Litecoin
#22Just a FYI: Litecoin does NOT confirm faster than bitcoins. Based on how the core bitcoin protocol works (which litecoin does not alter), a halving in confirmation time is also a halving in reliability of the confirmation.
Well I think the argument is that the reliability is increased by using scrypt instead of SHA256 which makes it harder for someone to control more than 50% of mining and that the result is about even.
Re: Coinbase hires Charlie Lee, creator of Litecoin
#23I can't be convinced that bitcoin is anything but inevitable, and I think that it will, at some point in the near future, solve its apparent problems by means of a company born from its very ecosystem
BTC is going to have issues as long as it takes a significant period of time to confirm a BTC transfer. I'm seeing reports of people trying to buy coffee, but the BTC transfer takes so long to confirm that the customer is long gone before you know whether or not the BTCs really transferred. Nothing can stop this either, it is innate to the system. BTC confirmations will take on the average 10minutes, but can last muc…
Any modern store would have an API that allows you to schedule a pickup through a mobile app and use Bitcoins as long as you schedule it 30 minutes to an hour before you arrive. What is this mentality Q2-2013?
Re: Coinbase hires Charlie Lee, creator of Litecoin
#24Is anyone else surprised that the creator of Litecoin needed to take a job? Given that the market cap of Litecoin is 53 million I would have expected the creator to have mined a good amount of that in the early days.
Of course he may have just wanted to take the job and not needed it but I would have assumed he would have worked on something for the Litecoin ecosystem.
Re: Coinbase hires Charlie Lee, creator of Litecoin
#25I can't be convinced that bitcoin is anything but inevitable, and I think that it will, at some point in the near future, solve its apparent problems by means of a company born from its very ecosystem
BTC is going to have issues as long as it takes a significant period of time to confirm a BTC transfer. I'm seeing reports of people trying to buy coffee, but the BTC transfer takes so long to confirm that the customer is long gone before you know whether or not the BTCs really transferred. Nothing can stop this either, it is innate to the system. BTC confirmations will take on the average 10minutes, but can last muc…
You can just wait until its in the memory pool of some trusted nodes. Double spend risk on coffee isn't worth waiting for a block.
Re: Coinbase hires Charlie Lee, creator of Litecoin
#26I can't be convinced that bitcoin is anything but inevitable, and I think that it will, at some point in the near future, solve its apparent problems by means of a company born from its very ecosystem
BTC is going to have issues as long as it takes a significant period of time to confirm a BTC transfer. I'm seeing reports of people trying to buy coffee, but the BTC transfer takes so long to confirm that the customer is long gone before you know whether or not the BTCs really transferred. Nothing can stop this either, it is innate to the system. BTC confirmations will take on the average 10minutes, but can last muc…
There is the concept of green addresses (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Green_address) to solve this. Basically if customers use a wallet that the merchant trusts not to commit a double spend then they can safely accept a zero confirmation transaction. MtGox and Bridgewalker (https://www.bridgewalkerapp.com) support this so if you trust them and your customer uses them then you can accept the transaction immediately.
Of course for something like a cup of coffee or even a purchase for $80 worth of clothes I think most companies would be fine with accepting a zero confirmation transaction and taking the risk as it will be far less of a cost then shoplifting and will be less than the 2% they currently pay on every credit card transaction. If you are buying a $1000 laptop then maybe they make you hang out while they explain the features and wait for a single confirmation.
Re: Coinbase hires Charlie Lee, creator of Litecoin
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
Credit card transactions can be reversed weeks/months after they are made. This is necessary to combat fraud, and is part of the reason why fees around 2% exist. In contrast, bitcoin transactions are infeasible to reverse after a few hours. That said, anything on the order of minutes is obviously too long to wait for certain types of transactions. Litecoin, with a target of 2.5 minutes between confirmations, does not…
> Credit card transactions can be reversed weeks/months after they are made Exactly. The instant approval from the credit card company is a close analogue to a signed transaction. Both prove that the person has the funds available and that they have the authority to authorize the transaction. The 40-minute confirmation delay is roughly equivalent to the 6 months or so that it takes before credit card transactions bec…
Grocery shopping is regularly over $100. A single network confirmation typically takes 10 minutes, but can take as long as an hour. (Block 152218 took 1 hour 40 minutes). Of course, there are plenty of examples where a blockchain was calculated in seconds... but such is the random nature of waiting for blockchain confirmations.
A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation says that 30% of the time, blockchains will take 20 or more minutes... and 5% of the time, blockchains will take 30 or more minutes. Are your customers willing to wait 30 minutes 5% of the time while doing their groceries?
Hell no. Waiting for even a _single_ blockchain takes too damn long, even if you reserve it for substantial amounts of money like $100+ transactions.
Re: Coinbase hires Charlie Lee, creator of Litecoin
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
BTC is going to have issues as long as it takes a significant period of time to confirm a BTC transfer. I'm seeing reports of people trying to buy coffee, but the BTC transfer takes so long to confirm that the customer is long gone before you know whether or not the BTCs really transferred. Nothing can stop this either, it is innate to the system. BTC confirmations will take on the average 10minutes, but can last muc…
You can just wait until its in the memory pool of some trusted nodes. Double spend risk on coffee isn't worth waiting for a block.
What about a $100+ grocery transaction? Are people willing to wait around 10 minutes in front of the cash register to wait for a single blockchain confirmation?
Re: Coinbase hires Charlie Lee, creator of Litecoin
#29Just a FYI: Litecoin does NOT confirm faster than bitcoins. Based on how the core bitcoin protocol works (which litecoin does not alter), a halving in confirmation time is also a halving in reliability of the confirmation.
In practice it doesn't seem to matter. For example btc-e.com who accepts both bitcoin and litecoin for trading makes you wait 3 confirmations for bitcoin and 6 confirmations for litecoin. So you are correct that 1 litecoin transaction is not as reliable as 1 bitcoin transaction but they are not making you wait 12 litecoin transactions.
Given that btc-e has a lot to lose on double spend attacks I think it's a good measure of how these two currencies are playing out in the market.
Re: Coinbase hires Charlie Lee, creator of Litecoin
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
BTC is going to have issues as long as it takes a significant period of time to confirm a BTC transfer. I'm seeing reports of people trying to buy coffee, but the BTC transfer takes so long to confirm that the customer is long gone before you know whether or not the BTCs really transferred. Nothing can stop this either, it is innate to the system. BTC confirmations will take on the average 10minutes, but can last muc…
There is the concept of green addresses ( https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Green_address ) to solve this. Basically if customers use a wallet that the merchant trusts not to commit a double spend then they can safely accept a zero confirmation transaction. MtGox and Bridgewalker ( https://www.bridgewalkerapp.com ) support this so if you trust them and your customer uses them then you can accept the transaction immediately.…
And now you've got "Credit Cards". Merchants won't accept your business unless you've got a trusted "green address", and you won't shop with merchants who don't support your "green address".
Again, attempts to solve this problem lead to a situation similar to credit cards... except worse (inherent to the extreme volatility and instability currently experienced in the BTC market).
Also, lol Mt. Gox. That company that you can't switch to USD every couple of weeks because they're not doing everything they can to keep their bank accounts open. Mt. Gox's instability is one of the worst things happening to the BTC market right now. If you give away your BTCs and store them on someone else's server, you're doing BTC wrong. Its no longer a decentralized system, but instead a new centralized system of currency.