That problem isn't a result of the 10 minute blocks. A 0-confirmation transaction normally is just fine. These are available on Bitcoin Cash.
It's really not fine at all.
The competition is full confirmation transactions on a debit card or bank account in seconds with much lower or zero fees.
At PoS systems in the US, it's typical to have to wait 30+ seconds for chip cards to go through. I'm guessing that this has more to do with the PoS system / slow internet connection for the store / slow network on the back-end card network, but cryptocurrencies would need to be sub-minute to be ~acceptable for in-person retail transactions.
Until that is solved, until cryptocoins are more than speculative securities where the value is only the current market price on a handful of exchanges, and until you can use them to realistically buy and sell things instead of using cash or a credit card, I don't consider them a "real" currency (by my own definition). I DO hope that it gets there some day, but I don't see that happening for at least another 5 years, likely with quite a few people who put a significant amount of money into it getting burned quite badly.
[1] https://squareup.com/townsquare/weve-chipped-away-at-emv-tra...
Seen it couple times.
The fundamental problem with bitcoin is that it is decentralised and trustless, and those two properties preclude fast transactions at a global scale - for that you need a federated system with trust between nodes. If you remove those properties, you're no longer using anything resembling bitcoin, and why not use a system with proper validated parties in the first place?
The bigger problem is having full blocks forever so it never gets processed.
I have no idea why you think that's related to time to confirm that a customer has money to pay for goods, which is an entirely unrelated problem which bitcoin solves badly in comparison to current payment networks, and due to its distributed nature is unlikely ever to solve well.
Actually, it really is. I've been accepting 0-conf transactions for nearly a year and had negligible double spends. https://incoherency.co.uk/blog/stories/zeroconf-payments.htm...
The small number of double-spends that did occur since I wrote that blog post I think are mostly due to bad luck (and opportunism) rather than malicious intent upfront, and represent only ~0.1% of payments.
1-The current solution is worse on this dimension.
2-Since Bitcoin Cash doesn't have replace-by-fee this is impractical for any small transaction.
3-Most of the situations that need to be immediate are small--with the large ones it makes sense to wait.
So your approach to preventing fraud is... to trust people not to defraud you?
Glad it worked for you with bitcoin and the particular people using your service, but that's not really a good basis for a payment network. There are multiple other problems with bitcoin as a payment network and currency, the delay in transactions (which prompted your experiment in ignoring a key part of the currency) is only one of them.
If you run Starbucks and serve 1000 transactions per day, you’ll have some fraud. If 0.1% are fraud, that’s not too bad.
No. Those do not compete with trustless digital money. If you think that then you don't understand the point of Bitcoin. It's like saying landlines are better than mobiles because you can never misplace them.
For larger amounts, you want confirmations, but then it's generally alright to wait a little while for confirmation, too.
Note that replace-by-fee means this only works with Bitcoin Cash.