Comment by ThrowawayTestr
2 years ago
>this is why crypto never took off as a replacement for credit cards
I thought it was because transactions take minutes instead of seconds.
2 years ago
>this is why crypto never took off as a replacement for credit cards
I thought it was because transactions take minutes instead of seconds.
And because it's uncompelling. I have a bunch of consumer protections around my credit card, why would I want to use crypto instead? Especially when it's a wildly fluctuating speculative asset and the burger I buy for $15 worth of coins today will be $60 dollars of coins tomorrow.
They can take either; waiting for confirmations is only a matter of reducing double-spend risk.
In practice, seconds after a transaction has been signed and broadcast, it is already very unlikely to double-spend. Miner incentives are such that the first-seen transaction is the most likely to be used. A delay of a couple seconds is sufficient to account for network-propagation lag.
You wouldn't do this for high-value transactions, but there's some threshold where real-world risk is lower than the convenience of a fast transaction, and that threshold is reasonably high.
That is almost certainly one reason and an important one. But as the other commenter to your comment shows, there is a lot more. Protections is a big one. I also personally side that, you need a way for people to interface with their crypto like they do with their current bank and as simple as possible. Normal people don't want to have to juggle around keys. Hell, Im a software engineer and I hate having to keep track of keys. So every time I get a new machine, I create fresh new SSH keys. My SSH keys are disposable to me.