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Comment by vasilipupkin | Hacker News Reader

For now, you cannot buy a pack of cigarettes with it, but as more vendords accept it, you will have apps on your phone that will let you easily do that.

Look, bitcoin is a platform and it is in it's infant stages. But, it has huge potential. Potential does not mean odds of success are 100%

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I don't think you understand even if the vendor accepts bitcoins, and even if I bring my laptop I still can't buy anything in under 5 minutes.

https://blockchain.info/charts/avg-confirmation-time

Yes you can. You do not necessarily need a confirmation if you are willing to take a small risk (and a vendor accepts risks much bigger than that if he's in business).

Considering the extent to which cigarette vendors around here keep their merchandise locked up, I don't think they're willing to take on a lot of "I hope these bitcoins are legit" risk.

Merchant software can listen to the network for 10 seconds. If no contradicting transactions have been broadcasted, the probability of the bitcoins not being legit is EXTREMELY small. You only need confirmations for large transactions. Zero-conf are completely safe for the large majority of transctions.

Bitcoin-type technology has tons of potential, my friend.

Or I can use actual money and forget all this nonsense ... Which do I choose?

What about credit cards? Chargebacks are quite common.

Credit cards are not a feature of a currency. You could just have credit cards that keep debt in BTC instead of USD.

The point of the person you're replying to is that, for 99.999999% of businesses, there is no benefit to using BTC. It doesn't offer the buyer any protection, it's extremely volatile, and it would require an overhaul of the entire economy's infrastructure to implement in any meaningful way.

This is incorrect, see my post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6812657

Also, nice strawman with the laptop. Ever heard of smartphones?

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