I’m so sick of this debate. Seriously, at this point, I’m saying it, if you are an altcoin developer focused on the speed of confirmations mattering, then you are out of ideas; you are no longer offering anything new to the community. You have bought into the grand delusion that has formed the basis for nearly every crappy coin in this space: more anonymity and faster confirmations. Holy hell, without Bitcoin, none of us would even know what a confirmation is. So when I hear people say thing like, “confirmation speeds are the biggest barrier to entry from the merchant adoption standpoint,” I can’t help but be cynical. If a Merchant hasn’t adopted Bitcoin, it is probably because either the merchant doesn’t think the decision to add Bitcoin is a good idea… yet (which is very reasonable and why my company doesn’t accept Bitcoin), or the merchant doesn’t know much about the technology. There are probably a whole host of other reasons, but none of them are confirmation times. There is not even one merchant in the world who has encountered the question of Bitcoin integration that has considered confirmation times - because you can’t know about that objection unless you are 1) way down the Bitcoin rabbit hole or 2) it’s told to you by a Bitcoiner who doesn’t know that it doesn’t matter.

Confirmation times don’t matter, 10 minutes is quasi-optimal, and there are a lot of ways to make mempool transactions nearly as secure as crappy POS confirmations. Moreover, for the purpose of trading, the only real “confirmation” time that matters is 0 seconds. 12 seconds is only nominally better in that sense than 10 minutes for those purposes. But 12 seconds comes with a host of other problems such as (but not limited to) the fact that 12 seconds is often going to be faster than a block can even propagate throughout the entire network. More than that, credit cards have a confirmation time of 6 months. That is about the time that a dispute can occur. So, there you have it, merchants don’t care about a 6 month confirmation time, so why do you think they’d give two hoots about a 10 minute one? And if you say that it’s because of trusted third parties like AMEX and VISA standing in between the transaction, then I can guarantee you that all you’re doing is identifying a business model that will spring up in Bitcoin. There will be insured processing. And, in the case of companies doing transaction insurance like Bitpay (yes Bitpay is a transaction insurer), they are solving the problem for themselves with some awesome existing ideas like multisig.

Litecoin was built to combat confirmation times. It’s still got a fraction of the hashing being pumped into it. Dark Coin was built, originally, to solve the anonymity problem. Now they introduced what they think is a fix to confirmation times. And yet, it has a fraction of the hashing power being pumped into it. Monero exists to solve the anonymity problem. It has a fraction of the hashing power being pumped into it. So tell me again, which market wants your solutions to anonymity? Which one wants your solutions to confirmation times? Because the irony of it is that if you want your transaction to be secure, then not only is the market voting with their speculating dollars, the miners are voting by adding their hashing power to the network. At the moment, the market doesn’t care, and neither do the miners.

So if you think that your coin is more secure than Bitcoin because your confirmation times are faster, consider that Bitcoin is secured by the most efficiently hashing computers. As of the date of this article, it is estimated that it is enough power to turn the lights on in 135,000 American homes. What that means is when that 10 minute confirmation time happens, and the Bitcoin network settles whate'er is in the mempool, that transaction is now secured by the hashing of computers consuming more than 1.5 terawatt-hours of power.

Just ask yourself, whether the confirmation time is 12 seconds or 10 minutes, once that first confirmation happens, would you rather have your confirmation be on the Bitcoin network or in the ledger of one of these altcoins?

The rational answer has to be the Bitcoin network.

So stop talking about confirmation times mattering. They don’t. If you care about the security of just-spent transactions, then the problem you actually care about is almost certainly mempool security. So put your efforts into making mempool transactions more secure and stop thinking that there is any merit in improving the speed of crappy, insecure confirmations.