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Comment by pieter | Hacker News Reader

I tried to get some free coins through the bitcoin faucet to a newly generated address (18YTP3wEbaiNX2QaQ4k1Gi89JgXntxAiff), but so far haven't received anything. Might be a problem on my end, or the transactions might just be slow, or they didn't send anything to me at all, but so far bitcoin transactions don't give the same instant gratification paypal or credit card payments give me, where you press the 'buy' button and get access to a service immediately. Perhaps this will get faster when the network becomes bigger, or if I use one of those digital wallet sites instead of running the client myself?

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It's hardly fair to compare Bitcoin to credit cards in terms of "instant gratification", unless you turn back the clock to when you said, Oh, there are such things as credit cards? Cool, how do I get one? I'm confident that the difficulty of acquiring your first bitcoin will compare favorably to the difficulty of acquiring your first credit card.

If the newly generated address is on your local machine, and it's a new client.. you will have to verify the block chain before you can conduct transactions. Probably you are blocking it up.. I got my .05 bitcoins right away.

You can't compare Bitcoin transactions to Paypal or credit card transactions. More analogous would be a Bitcoin transaction vs. dollars sent by mail.

Paypal and credit cards are just transactional layers on top a currency, they only represent the underlying currency. The actual exchange of the currency can take an arbitrary length of time (if it even happens at all).

Nothing precludes Bitcoin from having the same services built on top of it. When the time comes for Bitcoin to have truly instant transactions, the market will create this necessary layer.

There is ongoing attack on the network with a flood of low sum transactions ( http://bitcoincharts.com/bitcoin/ ). Because of this, transactions without fees are delayed.

If a transaction fee is included (which the bitcoin faucet doesn't include), the process is sped up.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin#Transaction_fees

Your client has to do some stuff before being able to connect and receive the notification. Keep it open for a few hours and you'll see the faucet coins.

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