[bsurmanski]

But do they eliminate the middleman? At least for Bitcoin, it takes an hour for any confidence that a transaction is truly valid. I'm not going to wait around for an hour just to grab my morning coffee.

So obviously there's going to need to be a credit backed middle man to guarantee your transaction so the seller doesn't get screwed by a double spend.

Eth is slightly better, but it still takes something on the order of 10m to confirm a transaction, and it doesn't look like it can get anywhere near the speed needed for a coffee purchase.

[thinkmassive]

Many altcoins attempt to solve the confirmation time problem. Litecoin is an early fork of Bitcoin that reduces the target block time to 2.5 minutes (probably still too slow for your coffee purchase). One that I see as having a lot of promise for retail purchasing is Dash[1]. They claim 1-second confirmations with InstantSend. I'm intrigued by the masternode network because it seems like the best compromise I've seen for gaining fast confirmations while maintaining most of the distributed and decentralized aspects of a good cryptocurrency.

Bitcoin is the largest and most prevalent, so it has become the currency most often used to exchange to fiat. Usually the transaction fees are still mostly negligible because these are larger transactions than the faster altcoins when they're used to make purchases.

[1] https://www.dash.org/

[rtpg]

Though I feel like a lot of BTCers are not interested in this, payment networks based on top of BTC would be very interesting.

Essentially no barrier to entry, and some federation could happen.

Of course, what you end up doing is creating banks, but hey they're not regulated by the government if you are behind 5 proxies? "Hobbyist bankers" might be fun.

The ultimate frustration of bitcoin is that it can occupy the entire range of decentralization, but the community compares everything to the logical limits of "the Federal Reserve will defeat math and generate BTC" and "I don't even have to trust my own computer to do this transaction!".

[xur17]

Eth confirmation is on the order of seconds: https://etherscan.io/chart/blocktime

[saurik]

That is the time to see it is in one block, not the time to feel truly confident in the payment.

[xur17]

But if you're buying a coffee, I think it's safe to only wait for 1 or 2 confirmations.

[maxerickson]

If you are buying coffee who cares about confirmations at all? Once the product is in your hand you are done.

It's the seller that would care about confirmations in that case. Hopefully they do something hilarious like have a bitcoin corral for people to wait in while their payments clear.

[xur17]

My point is that such a limited amount of money is at stake that confirmations really aren't all that important in this example. I think most places would just accept the risk. Heck, they could have the POS alert the owners if anything fishy happens between payment time, and when you actually receive your drink if they are really concerned.

I really don't think this is as big of a problem as you are making it out to be.

[maxerickson]

I don't think I'm making it out to be a big problem, I was just pointing out that for small transactions involving physical goods, the recipient of the digital currency is the one that is going to care more about the transaction finishing.

[krallja]

People still wait for coffee? I order from the app; it's paid for and ready for me when I walk in the door. With a 3 minute confirmation time, this flow still works. If it doesn't confirm, then they corral me, I guess.