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Square Market Accepts Bitcoin

corner.squareup.com

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Re: Square Market Accepts Bitcoin

#3

Post by theswan »

How is Square/Stripe getting around the issue that most exchanges wait for 6 confirmations before a transaction is accepted? Are they ignoring the risk of a double spend and just going ahead once a transaction has propagated to the network for mining?

Re: Square Market Accepts Bitcoin

#6

Post by Synaesthesia »

theswan wrote: post #3

How is Square/Stripe getting around the issue that most exchanges wait for 6 confirmations before a transaction is accepted? Are they ignoring the risk of a double spend and just going ahead once a transaction has propagated to the network for mining?

Great question! Although even 1 confirmation is relatively secure and 3 is quite acceptable, still that's 10-30 min.

Re: Square Market Accepts Bitcoin

#8

Post by buss »

theswan wrote: post #3

How is Square/Stripe getting around the issue that most exchanges wait for 6 confirmations before a transaction is accepted? Are they ignoring the risk of a double spend and just going ahead once a transaction has propagated to the network for mining?

> Are they ignoring the risk of a double spend and just going ahead once a transaction has propagated to the network for mining?

After a majority of the nodes have seen a transaction it becomes relatively safe to accept it as valid before 6 confirmations. You wouldn't want to do that for high value transactions, but I think it's fine up to a couple BTC (read: $1000 or less).

The Mycelium wallet implements transaction confidence: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1xqh51/new_mycelium... and http://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/2014/02/13/the-mathematically...

Re: Square Market Accepts Bitcoin

#9

Post by steveklabnik »

tlrobinson wrote: post #4

A not-insignificant group of existing payment processors / ecommerce platforms are now supporting Bitcoin. Shopify, Balanced (sort of), Stripe, and now Square. Am I missing any?

Hey, Steve from Balanced here. Curious as to why you say 'sort of' for us: if it's that we're in beta, so is Stripe.

(We're hoping to get out of beta in the near-ish timeframe.)

Re: Square Market Accepts Bitcoin

#10

Post by peter123 »

theswan wrote: post #3

How is Square/Stripe getting around the issue that most exchanges wait for 6 confirmations before a transaction is accepted? Are they ignoring the risk of a double spend and just going ahead once a transaction has propagated to the network for mining?

They probably absorb the risk of double-spend, which is way harder than stolen credit cards and chargebacks.
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