On Thu, Feb 12, 2015 at 08:15:01PM +0100, Alan Reiner wrote:
> The Bitcoin network achieves something that we didnt' think was possible
> 10 years ago:  a totally trustless, decentralized ledger.  The cost?  It
> takes time for the decentralized network to reach consensus that
> transactions "happened".  That is quite literally the trade-off that we
> make: you can centralize things by putting a bank in the middle and
> getting instant confirmation, or you decentralize and let the network
> reach consensus over time without the central authority.   If you want
> instant confirmations, you're going to need to add centralization
> because Bitcoin never offered it.  I support efforts to dispel any such
> myths as soon as possible and encourage building robust solutions
> (payment channels, insured zero-conf services, etc.).

Speaking of, a relatively simple thing that would help dispel these
notions would be if some wallets supported replace-by-fee-using
fee-bumping and an "attempt undo" button. Armory is an (unfortunately!)
special case because it uses a full node and has good privacy
guarantees, but most wallets could implement this by just sending the
doublespend transactions to any node advertising either the
replace-by-fee or GETUTXO's service bits.

1) https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/09/the_doghouse_cr.html

-- 
'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.org
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