[mpyne]

> I've actually created a service (B2B) which requires bitcoin as I need atomicity, which bitcoin delivers perfectly (as long as I wait for N confirmations, it's pretty certain that I now _own_ the bitcoins).

Atomicity is not a distributed database feature unique to Bitcoin, or even to PoW-based schemes in general.

Though if Bitcoin happens to work for your use case then by all means, don't reinvent the wheel.

> (as long as I wait for N confirmations, it's pretty certain that I now _own_ the bitcoins)

That's assuming your transaction makes it into a mined block. There have been backlogs of multiple blocks worth of transactions waiting to make it into a mined block, and there's been a huge blocksize debate going on partially because of that (which brings the potential for a fork of the blockchain into competing camps no less!)

Even after getting your transaction into a mined block, it's not unheard of to have orphaned blocks https://blockchain.info/charts/n-orphaned-blocks so you need to determine what level of atomicity you need. If it's actually 100% instead of 99.99% then even Bitcoin is not safe for your use case.

[brighton36]

You're being obtuse. If the point of contention is that a user's transactions might not be mined - your point is redundant. I've settled thousands of value transfers on the Bitcoin network, and have never had a transaction that didn't confirm. Additionally, if the nature of your business is such that this risk was nonetheless unacceptable, Bitpay and Coinbase will happily insure the confirmation risk for free, if you use their payment gateways. I'm certain that whatever this confirmation risk is, it's far less than the risk of a chargeback or receipt of a counterfeit dollar.