To confirm the Bitcoin transaction at all. That's just how Bitcoin works - you have to wait for X new blocks to get confirmations from other peers. How long you wait determines your risk level.
It doesn't require hours at the protocol level, it's just a social standard. Typically, the first confirmation would occur in ~10 minutes. At the moment, the convention is 6 blocks / 1 hour is sufficient to prevent double-spending, but any merchant could have its own standard.
Also, for something revocable like a domain name, there's nothing preventing Namecheap from giving you the domain name immediately, and then revoking your access to it later if the transaction ultimately fails.
> Also, for something revocable like a domain name, there's nothing preventing Namecheap from giving you the domain name immediately, and then revoking your access to it later if the transaction ultimately fails.
Not according to shiftpgdn:
> NameCheap actually doesn't have the capacity to revoke domains as they're an eNom reseller. Enom's policy is that once you buy a domain, it's yours. With domains sales being such a low margin business I can understand their level of caution.
> regular domains take 24 hours to be useful anyways
It only takes about 10 minutes for a new registration to go live with most registrars. If you set your DNS servers during the purchase and have the zones ready from the get-go, your domain is resolving on the web immediately.
that's accurate. we pride ourselves in getting most of our domains online and functional in about 30 seconds -- as long as you don't visit the domain within those first 30 seconds and get your ISP to cache the "does not exist" record.
Also, as Bitcoin matures, you'll see businesses pop up that will insure against the risk for a small portion of the transaction allowing near instant confirmation for merchants.
I love that over time people start coming up with solutions to the same damn problems that other payment schemes have already come up with, and that last week they were saying were evil because someone else was doing it.
It's not unique to bitcoin, you see it in all sorts of places, it is funny though.
The difference is competition. Nothing fancy, nothing new and shiny. Just something that has been proven to work time and time again in lowering prices.
The barrier to entry in the payment card industry is simply too high to allow much competition. Entering the business of bitcoin payment processing has an extremely low barrier to entry; all the hard stuff has been done already!
Bitcoin is first and foremost a currency, not a payment scheme. You can use it like cash with no (or minimal) fees, or you can layer schemes with various properties on top of it.
But when people then layer payment schemes and payment-scheme type-assurances, services and (of course) fees on top of it, is it wrong to make this comparison?
Because at the moment you see a lot of people touting the 'no fees' part as the reason it wins over credit/debit cards, but when the weaknesses of that are pointed out someone like yourself inevitably pops up to tell us that of course it's not meant for that, but payment systems can be layered over the top, with a fee structure. Or it's silly to expect that because it's just like cash, when the expectation is in response to a BTC advocates claim that it's the best thing evar for the problem domain.
Basically it can't be both ways and I am kinda tired of the constant claims that it is.
