Doesn't taking an hour or more to confirm a transaction basically make bitcoin useless for any real-time transactions ( buying something at a shopping mall, buying fast food/coffee etc)
This makes bitcoin much less useful in my personal opinion.
This makes bitcoin much less useful in my personal opinion.
This is assuming retail stores will wait for 6 confirmations to get 100% assurance in the blockchain. Many retail stores take a certain level of risk with all plastic/digital transactions currently with credit/debit cards. I doubt many would see much utility in waiting for more than 1 confirmation, considering the difficulty involved in faking one and the lack of real stories of this 'scam' actually happening.
Especially for low-margin sales like coffee, food, or other sub-$100 transactions.
As with any scam of this nature it will likely involve side-step the crypto system somehow (ie, target the mobile apps used for PoS) rather than breaking the blockchain confirmation scheme directly.
We really need Lightning Network, which segwit enables. That allows near-instantaneous (with only network propagation delays) transactions.
The key thing is that bitcoin transactions are not reported to the government -- very helpful if you're desperate to move a large amount of cash out from a country with heavy currency controls like China or Venezuela.
IMO we really should be pushing for GNU Taler, which is a system that doesn't have proof of work, is confirmed effectively immediately, and has many more privacy properties similar to cash. It works by having a mint sell customers coins (using whatever standard method of payment you like), the customer spends coins on merchants and then the merchants can redeem the coins for "real" money.
In particular, customers cannot be identified (nor can their transaction history) but merchants' income can be identified (for tax reasons). As the system doesn't require proof-of-work the speed problem is massively reduced as well as the transaction cost.
In addition, Taler is _federated_ not fully decentralised. It works basically how cash works, except you don't need to be a new country to set up a new currency. In order for a particular mint's cash to be spent you only need that mint to be around.
I don't get why "decentralised or bust" is the end goal. Federation with individual privacy is still an improvement over centralised credit card companies. Also, like it or not, but Taler has much better privacy guarantees than BitCoin.