How to Break the 10 min Bitcoin Confirmation Barrier

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Most people don’t realize that one of the fundamental roadblocks in Bitcoin is the long confirmation time: you have to wait on average 10 minutes for a transaction to be confirmed. Any merchant who processes a transaction before it’s been approved runs the risk of not getting paid. For merchants used to credit card processing in seconds, the 10 minute confirmation barrier hinders the adoption of Bitcoin.

“In a POS world, especially in high value merchandise like jewelry, handbags or electronics it’s simply not viable.”
-David Mondrus, Bitzme

BlockCypher has created technology that enables merchants to confirm transactions in mere seconds with 99.9% confidence.

BlockCypher is like Amazon Web Services for Bitcoin. Our platform exposes web services to help developers build, monitor and secure Bitcoin applications.

For developers wanting to implement this technology, request a token and read our documentation.

The 10 Minute Barrier

To fully secure transactions, the Bitcoin network assembles them in blocks that are built by miners and verified by all peers. Blocks get built every 10 minutes on average but can occasionally take much longer. Waiting for 6 blocks is recommended for a fully secured transaction, which can take an hour.

Many merchants cannot wait 10 minutes to process a customer’s transaction, much less an hour. This forces the merchant to accept transactions even though they haven’t been fully secured.

Buying in <10 Seconds

“CoinSafe merchants can now do fast exchanges of cash for bitcoin, instead of waiting an hour. BlockCypher’s APIs are the best in the business: no other solution is robust enough to do it securely. I’ve tried them all.”
- Michael Flaxman, CoinSafe

BlockCypher’s new features allow merchants and other Bitcoin applications to assess, within milliseconds, the actual risk incurred of processing a transaction almost immediately rather than waiting for its confirmation by the block chain.

For example, if BlockCypher returns a confidence factor of 99.99%, the probability of the transaction getting confirmed by the block chain is almost certain. If we return a confidence factor of 95%, the merchant can weigh whether or not to process the transaction immediately or wait a few seconds more for the confidence factor to go up (within 10 seconds, BlockCypher typically returns a confidence factor close to 99.9%).

For a low value item such as a candy bar, the risk may be manageable; for a higher value item such as a laptop, the merchant can wait 10 seconds for BlockCypher to give them a higher confidence factor.

How BlockCypher Does It

“BlockCypher’s APIs are bringing the crypto ecosystem closer to eliminating double spends and reducing confirmation times.”
- Ross McKelvie, Lead Engineer at startup incubator BoostVC

With the following BlockCypher capabilities, developers can build merchants tools to enable immediate transactions with assurances that they will be accepted by the block chain:

• Double-spend notifications. Be notified anytime a new double-spend is detected.
• Transaction risk factor. Get a confidence factor for every unconfirmed transaction. This allows merchants and developers to assess the risk of accepting a transaction within milliseconds.
• Transaction preference. Know how fast a transaction will make it into a block.

Our servers are connected to a sizable share (many multiple hundreds) of the block chain peer-to-peer network. As a result, we receive a great deal of information from all these peers and can detect and report when two transactions are trying to spend the same outputs.

Similarly, we know which share of the network already knows about a given transaction as they advertise it to us. In a paper published by the IEEE, researchers found that the more nodes that are connected to the network for a transaction, the lower the probability that it will be double spent.

We combine the research data and the information we get from all the peers connected to us to produce the risk factor in real-time. Merchants can now confirm transactions confidently in mere seconds.

Developers: get started by requesting a BlockCypher token and reading our documentation.