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by lmm
4130 days ago
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> The difference is after that 10 minutes, the transaction is settled. The money has moved. What you have with a credit card in 10 minutes is a promise that the money will move, possibly days or even weeks later. In a spherical-cow sense bitcoin is better. In practice, if I'm paying with amex I tap my card on the reader and the waitress hands me the cup of coffee in seconds; if I'm paying with bitcoin I'm standing there for half an hour. > The bitcoin can be moved again (spent by the receiver) after 10 minutes. Try that with money you received by a credit card payment. If a friend's sending me money it's by "faster payment"; theoretically it can take up to 2 hours (similar to bitcoin's max times), in practice it's a couple of minutes. My bank's happy for me to "spend it instantly" in terms of not charging me an overdraft fee (in fact I can spend it before I get it, as long as I put the money in by the end of the day), so I have GBP1500 (let's call it $2500) of float. There are edge cases where this doesn't work - more than $2500, or paying internationally over the internet. But they really are edge cases; the problems bitcoin solves are problems I've never had, and I suspect that's true for the vast majority of "normal people". |
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This is a myth. Once the transaction has propagated through the network, it's pretty difficult to double-spend, even with zero confirmations. So difficult, in fact, that payment processors like Stripe/Coinbase/BitPay will completely absorb that risk for you and consider the order complete within a second or two of seeing the transaction on the network.
Try buying something online with Bitcoin sometime, it really is faster and easier than using a credit card (if you already own some).