| >>If I attempted to buy an ice cream cone with Bitcoin, will the money be transferred before the ice cream melts? The transfer is instant. To get a guarantee of settlement takes 6 confirmation, or about one hour, which is much quicker than the 6 weeks it takes for a credit card transaction to become irreversible. Unless you're purchasing something like a house, you don't need the payment to settle to complete the purchase, with either cryptocurrency or credit card payments. Ethereum's confirmations take 15 seconds, to Bitcoin's 10 minutes, and you need about 12 to have a virtual guarantee of irreversibility. Only the large-cap cryptocurrencies can provide a high assurance of irreversible payments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17173051 >>What costs more, the transaction fees or the ice cream cone? In (small-block) Bitcoin, at any reasonable level of adoption, the transaction fee, which is why small transactions could only be economical using an off-chain protocol like the Lightning Network, which has been in development for several years and is still largely unproven as a full substitute for regular Bitcoin transactions. Bitcoin (Cash) guarantees low fees into the future as a result of a high maximum block size. With Bitcoin Cash, there is a higher risk of settled transactions being reversed with a 51% attack, given it has only 10% of the hashrate of (small-block) Bitcoin. Ethereum's transaction fees are currently much lower than the cost of an ice cream, but that wouldn't persist with higher levels of adoption. That could change once it implements sharding, with promises to increase maximum transaction throughput 100X, or has the sub-chain plasma protocol deployed, which potentially enables virtually infinite scaling. |