Namecheap And Bitcoin – A Review

cryptojunky.com

22 points·CryptoJunky··4 comments

Namecheap does NOT need to be waiting for even a single confirmation to accept deposits. The kinds of services that they offer are all easily reversible within the kinds of timescales where double spend attacks are feasible (domain registrations take days to clear), so they are certainly not in the class of merchants that could practically be defrauded. The only businesses that actually need to wait for transactions are SatoshiDice, exchanges and consumable digital goods sellers (eg. game codes).

Fortunately, most Bitcoin vendors actually do accept transactions without waiting, and I've only heard of SatoshiDice successfully being defrauded (they've since added various defense mechanisms against unconfirmed transaction double-spending).

My guess would be that BitPay requires the 6 confirmations, not NameCheap in particular. If they wanted to accept zero confirmation transactions then they'd likely need to implement their own Bitcoin wallet and associated checkout service.

The appeal of a service like Bitpay of course is that it converts that Bitcoin into fiat currencies, such as the USD, without the vendor having to deal with it. I agree that a zero or single confirmation system could be implemented by a vendor such as NameCheap. However, it would be more costly and time consuming than their current use of Bitpay.

Hmm, I remember seeing BitPay merchants take zero-conf just fine.

This is a very good point. Looks like vendors are just copying each other's practices, like 6 confirmations, without looking into why they need to be in place.

A lot of people mention the 6 confirmations requirement as a serious inconvenience of Bitcoin, when in reality, a lot of the time it is not necessary at all.

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