Mike Hearn <mike <at> plan99.net> writes: [snip] > Daniel is right that putting every possible provider in the Payment message might not scale in a world where there are huge numbers of instant- confirmation providers, but I'm hoping that we never have to scale to that size, because if we did that'd rather imply that Bitcoin has become useless for in-person payments without trusted third parties and avoiding that is rather the whole point of the project :) So I'm OK with some theoretical lack of scalability for now.
Hard to say for now. I like the current simplicity but if someone can come up with some use case for other options we should discuss and investigate them. I don't see more than a bunch of accepted payment methods anywhere I ever been in my life, I don't see merchants trusting more than a handful of third parties. > A more scalable approach would be for the user to send the name and signature of their "instant provider" every time and the merchant just chooses whether to ignore it or not, but as Lawrence points out, this is incompatible with the provider charging extra fees for "instantness". But should we care? I'm trying to imagine what the purchasing experience is like with optional paid-for third party anti-double-spend protection. Ultimately it's the merchant who cares about this, not me, so why would I ever pay? I think you are wrong here. Just because up to date credit cards charged the merchant which in turn charged you and the ordinary cash payer doesn't mean a newer and better system can't be transparent from day one. Ultimately you care because the alternative is to wait. > It makes no sense for me to pay for double spend protection for the merchant: after all, I'm honest. It's quite simple, in a low amounts world people will probably accept zero confs, just like occasionally people can walk out with a bag of crisps without paying from a Pret in London. Guards would cost more than what they'd save from thefts. With higher amounts they will either not accept bitcoin unless instant confirmed or they will make you wait if that's even feasible (unlikely in a supermarket or petrol station but perfectly fine at the restaurant maybe). > This is why it doesn't make sense for me to pay miners fees either, it's the receiver who cares about confirmations, not the sender. You care too: time and money, or just money if you want to use the old simplification. > So I wonder if a smarter design is that the user always submits the details of their instantness provider and we just don't allow for optional selection of instantness. I'm not sure that works, UX wise, so is having a less scalable design to support it worthwhile? We would not support that I think. Explicit is better than implicit. We will charge for instant confirmation and wouldn't want the user charged unless pre-agreed, especially if then they also have to wait because the instant tx was not recognized as such. Yeah we can charge the merchant that can then in turn charge you, we may as well charge you and be transparent about it but also have deals with merchant where they pay fixed amounts per month for unlimited tx and make it free for their users. Perhaps just like today people ask you which card you are going to use and they may not accept Amex or Diners the same will go for instant and they, the merchants, will just pick the instant provider from a touch screen before allowing the payment in. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ HPCC Systems Open Source Big Data Platform from LexisNexis Risk Solutions Find What Matters Most in Your Big Data with HPCC Systems Open Source. Fast. Scalable. Simple. Ideal for Dirty Data. Leverages Graph Analysis for Fast Processing & Easy Data Exploration http://p.sf.net/sfu/hpccsystems _______________________________________________ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
