[grondilu]

Bitcoin is both a currency and a payment method. Everybody knew right from the beginning that it's not a great payment method. The 10 minutes delay is a long time if you want to prevent double-spending.

For fast payments nothing beats a server with credit accounts. Naysayers will say that it defeats the purpose of bitcoin, but nobody thought bitcoin would entirely make banks and their fractional reserves system disappear. If anything, people will still want to borrow money.

Banks could function on top of cryptocurrencies, the difference would be that their clients would be able to withdraw their funds out of the banking system alltogether at any time, that is not just turning one credit into an other.

[notahacker]

If it's not a decent payment method, it's not a currency. Sure, there are plenty of non-currency assets which are deficient as payment methods highly valued to investors, but they tend to have some use value or return.

Why would banks function on top of something which has no use value, generates no returns and whose sole claim to be a useful asset rests on its fungibility, which is now inferior to that of currency except in cases of regulation evasion? If people are concerned credit instruments are too risky because debtors sometimes fail to repay, it makes no sense to swap it out of their portfolio for something with no more intrinsic value than a credit instrument but also no repayment obligations.

[grondilu]

> If it's not a decent payment method, it's not a currency.

Before bitcoin, was there any currency that was also a payment method?

I would also add that though it's not great a payment method, it's not to a degree worse than payments in euros for instance. Bank wire transfers take up to three days in Europe. I don't hear anyone stating that this undermines the value of euro as a currency.

[JumpCrisscross]

> was there any currency that was also a payment method?

Every currency has, by definition, native payment methods. (If it doesn't, it's a settlement system, not a currency.) Most simply: physical cash.

Electronic payment systems are more complicated. In some countries, consumers can directly access them. In others, e.g. the United States, consumers indirectly access the settling-in-seconds and costing-pennies Fedwire system through banks.

> Bank wire transfers take up to three days in Europe

Maximum settlement time for SEPA transfers has been 1 business day since 2012.

[1] https://www.ecb.europa.eu/pub/pdf/other/sepa_brochure_2009en... footnote on page 20

[grondilu]

> Maximum settlement time for SEPA transfers has been 1 business day since 2012.

I had not noticed. It's still much longer than 10 minutes, isn't it?

[JumpCrisscross]

> It's still much longer than 10 minutes, isn't it?

Wrong tool for the task. Ironically, every transaction I’ve done in Europe used U.S. dollars and Fedwires, which close immediately and cost basically nothing. When people go off about petrodollars or whatever, the simple fact of American international payment superiority is often missed.

(The ECB has been taking about an always-on instantaneous system for a while [1]. I haven’t kept track of its progress.)

[1] https://www.ecb.europa.eu/paym/retpaym/instant/html/index.en...

[notahacker]

People have only been paying with coins for six or so millenia now...

(And of course the reason bank credit has more recently become treated as currency and accepted as electronic payment is because it's exchangeable on demand, at parity to and often instantaneously for legal tender)

[grondilu]

When you exchange coins physically, the payment method is ... your hands.

> bank credit has more recently become treated as currency

A bank credit is not a currency. The thing it is denominated into (EUR, USD, BTC...) is.

> And of course the reason bank credit has more recently become treated as currency (sic) and accepted as electronic payment

I think the real reason is that people had little to no choice in that regard.

[koonsolo]

> For fast payments nothing beats a server with credit accounts.

For scalability and robustness, one server won't cut it. You need a whole infrastructure to handle lots of payments securely.

I see various exchanges having trouble with scaling to support all their (new) customers, and basically they are doing the "single server" that you are talking about. Only at deposit/redraw they need to go over the requested blockchain.

So in that sense, what is your view on the latest generation of cryptocurrencies which have instant transactions and 0 fees (such as Nano)? Since I consider them the BitTorrent of currencies, I don't see how any institution could beat that.

[r3demon]

0-confirmation transactions were working excellent before Bitcoin Core added SegWit and other useless stuff. You don't need to wait for a new block if your signed transaction is in the mempool, and it's secure enough for small payments.

[freejulian]

0 conf transactions are incredibly insecure. If you accept one you are putting a great deal of trust in the person paying you. Bitcoin transactions are suppose to be trustless.

[makomk]

They are. Some context might help: when it originally launched, Bitcoin Cash was slower and more unusable than Bitcoin if you needed even a single confirmation, because the forker fucked up the difficulty adjustment algorithm so badly that blocks were every hour or so most of the time. So the Bitcoin Cash community pushed the idea that zero-confirmation transactions were safe there, unlike on the evil SegwitCoin chain, so they could claim it was still faster than Bitcoin since this was the whole selling point. There was no actual foundation for this claim, but it became vital to marketing the coin.

[r3demon]

OK. So 0-conf are not secure because you read it somewhere, good argument.

[r3demon]

No, they are secure, you just have to trust miners a bit more so they don't throw your transaction out of mempool. I would even argue that all the complications involved in setting up and using Lightning network make it less secure than 0-conf.

[notsrg]

You could argue it, but you'd be wrong. 0-conf requires trust, LN is trust-less.

[grondilu]

> You don't need to wait for a new block if your signed transaction is in the mempool

Still, many companies have always required a few confirmation blocks before accepting a transaction, regardless of the amount. Like currency exchange companies, for instance.