Comment by jamoes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jamoes | Hacker News Reader

Interesting product. It doesn't really look like this is meant to make any money for the developer yet (maybe the plan is to add fees to their mining pool at some point in the future?). I suspect the point is to drive policy so that companies and individuals don't trust transactions with zero confirmations, or at least start checking for double-spend attempts. The standard right now for many companies is to accept zero-confirmation transactions (e.g. bitpay does this). Because this is such a widespread practice, it's effectively a security vulnerability of the bitcoin network as a whole. If this site can change this standard, then maybe they'll make the bitcoin ecosystem more secure.

This is an interesting phenomenon of the bitcoin ecosystem. If someone owns a lot of bitcoins, they're incentivized to make something like this even if it doesn't directly make them any money.

By the way, the extended FAQ for the mining pool is still showing Lorem Ipsum text: http://www.bitundo.com/pool/faq.html

> It doesn't really look like this is meant to make any money for the developer yet

Incorrect.

> the new fee you will need to pay is 10% of the undo amount, plus the original mining fee. Note: If you are sending a secret transaction, you must then double this fee

http://www.bitundo.com/developer.html

Ah, I didn't catch that part. 10% of the transaction seems like quite a steep fee. I don't really like how they hide the fee breakdown buried in the developer documentation.

It's not bad considering this is an emergency service that might prevent you from losing the full amount.

If miners want to provide this service, can't they just resolve double-spends based on mining fee?

It doesn't seem like it there needs to be a middle-man here.

That was my thought; this system sounds a lot more complex than replace-by-fee and child-pays-for-parent rules that have been discussed for a while.

Breaking instant payments doesn't make Bitcoin more secure, it just makes it less useful. The model generalises to probabilistic rewriting of the block chain, there's nothing special about confirmed vs unconfirmed.

Bitcoin assumes the majority of hash power obeys the rules. At the moment, nobody knows how to build a system in which the majority of all players are dishonest and colluding against you, and Bitcoin is definitely not such a system. People who think it can be trivially evolved into such a system need a reality check: the more miners become dishonest and don't play by the rules, the less useful Bitcoin becomes. It doesn't take 51% to make it practically useless either.

This is why it exists https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=257525.0

Bitcoin apps/sites are using blockchain.info API as a hot wallet. I bet some exchanges are secretly doing this too. Surprised there doesn't already exist a hot wallet as a service yet. A competent one would make assloads of profit from gambling and betting sites that don't want to run their own.

Won't that be a big problem for everyday transactions though, to have to wait 10 mins for a confirmation instead of immediately like swiping a credit card when say you go out to eat or go grocery shopping?

Won't that then hurt the usefulness of bitcoin and adoption rate?

Bitcoin was never designed for instant confirmation. The sooner everyone involved realizes this, the better.

Perhaps there's a place and need for certain supporting infrastructure around Bitcoin—similar to what we have with bank cards. In the latter case payment doesn't necessarily happen immediately as you swipe the card (the transaction can be pending authorization for a few days afterwards).

Some service could provide instant payments with Bitcoin and handle chargebacks, disputes, credits, etc. I guess if Bitcoin is successful, the big players would go after that.

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