Author of the BIP draft for the Instant Confirmation Payment Protocol aka BIP70 extension and founder of GreenAddress.
You can find the draft here https://github.com/greenaddress/bips/blob/bip-payment-reques...
Bitcoin dev mailing list discussion http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.bitcoin.devel/5628
Reddit discussion http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/284me8/instant_conf...
The aim of this extension is to reduce risk by allowing, via a third party, instant confirmation of bitcoin transactions.
Questions, comments and in general any feedback is very welcome!
Cheers! Lawrence
How do you see the fees finalizing? Will there still be a significant cost reduction for in person transactions once the industry has matured a bit more? (equivalent of CC transactions in terms of ease of use).
Either way, this is a cool idea, best of luck to you.
Another important thing to note is that you're likely a member of a very privileged class, by virtue of being on HN. You likely have a bank account and a credit card. Not everyone is so lucky, and Bitcoin serves many of the same needs you fulfill with the traditional financial system.
Then you have remittance. Imagine you are a Somali immigrant living in Michigan, and you'd like to send money to your brother in Xamar. How do you do that? It's legal, but to my knowledge no US Bank operates in the region. Bitcoin world's as easily to your brother as it does to anyone else.
Fundamentally, Bitcoin is trying to be a settlement network and an asset and a UI and a platform for developing future financial services and now a half-baked business-oriented transaction layer on top of the settlement network. Unix philosophy[1] says this is insane, and as someone involved with one of the largest exchanges, I'm inclined to agree.
Most of this stuff boils down to using Bitcoin to try to solve things it's not well-suited to solving, eg. instant payment.
I mean .. adding X.509 & SSL[2] to Bitcoin clients to 'simplify' payments? Really? Do you guys have any idea what that does to an implementation's risk model?
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy [2] https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0070.mediawi...
Other than that, instant confirmation is also done via our own API (which is via wss, ssl) and there is no reason as to why it couldn't be done with ECDSA instead, issue as usual is key management.
You think arbitrage&liquidity between exchanges via instant confirmation is not well suited for exchanges?
There's also other users that can check either inside the GreenAddress wallet or at https://greenaddress.it/instant
it's called GreenAddress because when I thought about the concept, end of 2012 beginning of 2013 it wasn't yet associated with the bad reputation or MtGox double spends and I felt anyhow that it could be improved (which I think we did).
The modus operandi of the platform is different from the original GreenAddress concept as the instant confirmation comes out of band and is based on multisignature allowing the system to prevent users double spends.
However, like the original GreenAddress concept, it is based on third party trust, there is no magic bullet.
Haven't we already agreed this is meaningless?
It should be removed imho. Especially since the instant confirmation with a monitor couldn't really be synchronous without .. wait for it, waiting.
good catch!
The 'instant' comes from trusting a third party that temporarily controls enough keys to block the funds before they can get double spent but long enough that the tx can be confirmed.
http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/06/bitcoin-security-gua...
http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/284me8/instant_conf...
Not to dismiss the 51% issue but that would affect all transactions, this -'instant protocol' is on top of bitcoin, not in replacement of.
