Author: Eric Lombrozo 2015-06-20 03:07:02
Published on: 2015-06-20T03:07:02+00:00
The discussion among members of the Bitcoin-development mailing list revolves around the safety of retail payments using Bitcoin. Andreas Petersson argues that adding measures to ensure transaction safety would exclude 99.9% of potential users, and in practice, the fraud potential with Bitcoin is much lower than with cash. Matt Whitlock suggests that retail merchants should require a co-signature from a mutually trusted co-signer who vows never to sign a double-spend. Aaron Voisine believes that what retail needs are escrowed microchannel hubs like lightning, which enable untrusted instant payments instead of relying on single-signer zeroconf transactions that can never be made safe. Eric Lombrozo adds that payment processors and merchants need decent risk models with capped losses and safe recovery mechanisms as many dangerous assumptions are being made. The consensus seems to be that waiting for a handful of confirmations has always been recommended practice for any online or automated system.
Updated on: 2023-06-09T23:48:40.807640+00:00