BrokenPipe

You got that backwards, one of the two, Mike, suggested to that they should spend some time working on payment channel and improvements like lightning and since they though it was a good idea they did.

Blockstream has to benefit from blocks as large as possible without losing decentralisation and security properties, like everyone else.

I agree with your friend. Avoid Italy.

There's no good reason to open in Italy, especially when in EU you can open in many other places which are much cheaper and easier to deal with.

I think we did, good point.

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!

To answer to your question, I think your points have already been raised and while I may even share them BIP70 is by default using SSL and X.509 and it seems natural to use it for extensions too.

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?

cheers!

Not really, the payment protocol gives you back the full transaction that can be checked by the merchant.

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.

I got distracted, sorry

I think fees will get cheaper as times goes by and the bitcoin network and market matures but it is very hard to say right now with the current transaction size limitations.

Bitcoin is still in early development and very niche, so far the incentives have been working well enough but once the block rewards halves is yet to be seen if fees will be competitive enough and whether the price for them will go up. We also have to hope that the block size and the network capacity can grow fast enough to support its own weight.

In general I think that as more players come in the industry the fees of exchanges, atms, debit cards etc will decrease.

I wish some core developer could also contribute to answer your question and provide more insight than i can offer.

We don't provide instant confirmation but that does not mean you can't spend your funds without it.

The minimum is 1 day or 144 blocks, default to 90 days, max is max block size.

Do you think the banking industry will support the unbanked faster than a stable and accessible internet will reach them?