Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] If you had a single chance to double the transactions/second Bitcoin allows...

From: Sergio Demian Lerner <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 7 Aug 2015 20:08:02 -0300

In some rare occasions in everyday life, what matters is seconds. Like when
paying for parking in the car while some other cars are behind you in the
line. You don't want them to get upset.

I takes me tens of minutes to shop. But once you choose your merchandise
and your payment starts processing, if the payment system allows several
payments to be pending simultaneously and you're not blocking the next
person to pay, then I don't care waiting some minutes for confirmation. But
saving 10 minutes of confirmation is a lot.

I ague that our time is mostly measured in minutes (but I don't have any
sociological, cultural, genetic or anthropological evidence). It takes
minutes to read an e-mail, minutes to correct a bug, minutes to have lunch,
minutes to drive to the office, minutes to talk to your kids. A payment
taking 1 minute is much better than a payment taking 10. If I could choose
a single thing to change to Bitcoin, I would lower the payment time, even
within the minute scale.

Sergio

On Fri, Aug 7, 2015 at 7:46 PM, Natanael <[email-masked]> wrote:

> Den 7 aug 2015 23:37 skrev "Sergio Demian Lerner via bitcoin-dev" <
> [email-masked]>:
> >
> > Mark,
> > It took you 3 minutes to respond to my e-mail. And I responded to you 4
> minutes later. If you had responded to me in 10 minutes, I would be of out
> the office and we wouldn't have this dialogue. So 5 minutes is a lot of
> time.
> >
> > Obviously this is not a technical response to the technical issues you
> argue. But "minutes" is a time scale we humans use to measure time very
> often.
>
> But what's more likely to matter is seconds. What you need then is some
> variant of multisignature notaries (Greenaddress.it, lightning network),
> where the combination of economic incentives and legal liability gives you
> the assurance of doublespend protection from the time of publication of the
> transaction to the first block confirmation.
>