Could Bitcoin Transactions Be 100x Faster?

Abstract

Bitcoin is a crypto currency, a distributed peer-to-peer financial system. Well actually it is an electronic system which manages the provisional ownership of a strictly fixed supply of abstract fungible units which really works as a distributed property register or a digital notary service. This is not so different than managing the ownership of shares in traditional financial markets. Modern financial institutions increasingly just do NOT trust each other, they build co-operative robust and decentralized and increasingly transparent, electronic systems which are and able to both serve the diverse objectives of participants (e.g. traders) and uphold certain security policies. Is Bitcoin actually so brilliant to be called the Internet of money as it is sometimes claimed? Not quite. Consider just the question of speed. Super low latency transactions are a norm in the financial industry, and even ordinary people have access to super fast bank transfers and real-time credit card transactions. Bitcoin remains rather the horse carriage of money. In this paper we look at the question of fast transaction acceptance in bitcoin and other crypto currencies. We claim that bitcoin needs to change in order to be able to satisfy the most basic needs of modern users.