Sounds like an opportunity for a "bitcoin credit card" or "bitcoin charge card" where a trusted third party maintains complete control.
The problem is that all the advantages of Bitcoin is now lost, and you have transferred control of Bitcoin to the Bitcoin bank.
For example: you can gather Flexcoins, which allow instantaneous transfers and so forth. But by doing so, you no longer have Bitcoins. You only have Flexcoins, and if the Flexcoin bank goes under... you lose all of your bitcoins.
IE: Using Flexcoins (or any other form of Bitcoin bank) completely defeats the purpose of Bitcoin.
This exists now with charge cards. You load up a card, and you bear risk that the company could go under.
"IE: Using Flexcoins (or any other form of Bitcoin bank) completely defeats the purpose of Bitcoin."
I'm not talking about an alternative coin. I'm talking about something akin to what happens now with CHIPS and FedWire, where the dollars are shuffled at a later date but the transactions are approved before it happens.
That isn't a loss of the advantages of bitcoin, because you got to choose which organization to trust, if any. With government currencies, you don't get to choose.
Bitcoin actually provides a new choice: government or no-government. People that want government/cb currency are free to choose it. People that want no-government money can choose Bitcoin.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/70/US-%245-...
Which is the entire point of this thread of discussion. People are not liking the restrictions on Bitcoin (ie: wait X number of hashes before the transaction is complete), and are recreating "alternative currencies" for Bitcoin. Which to me... seems against the point of the medium.
https://coinbase.com/merchants : "Confirmed in 1 hour"
Underlying issue not addressed
Which is faster than any credit card gives money to a merchant. As is a one hour final confirmation.
What Coinbase (and other bitcoin payment processors) offer is instant confirmation that the customer has the funds available and that the payment is allocated to you. This is all a credit card is 'confirming' for you in seconds as well. It's the same thing. "Payment is available and is coming your way".
What's different is that Coinbase is saying that within an hour, the funds are 'confirmed' as yours. They are available to you in your wallet. You can do with them as you will. You literally have money in the bank.
Now, converting those funds to USD and having them show up in your bank account takes a few days, but that's the legacy banking system that's at fault there.
If you want to spend the Bitcoins at Bitcoins, however, you have only to wait an hour.
The difference between waiting a month for your money and waiting an hour is absolutely tremendous. The fact that our business ecosystem has evolved to work with the delay doesn't mean that removing the delay is not desirable.
Removing that economic friction is revolutionary. It can facilitate new business models and accelerate the pace of commerce. That's the real importance of Bitcoin, or of whatever cryptocurrencies follow on after it.
They reduce friction and increase economic velocity.
> However, the problem is that the amount of time it takes for a transaction to become "verified," i.e. be part of the official block chain, can take up to 10 minutes.
coinbase is pretty cool but fails completely at solving the posted problem. The soonest I've seen payments settle is in about an hour.