Mike Murphy

Kurt Wuckert Jr Verified account @kurtwuckertjr · Oct 29

If you’re an SPV Maxi, an Electrum maven, a BRC-100 bro, or want to build wallets that do any other thing, your engineering ideas shouldn’t lead you to being a jerk.

Criticisms land much better with kindness and a respect for other ideas.

Be good to each other.

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Connor Murray Verified account @Bitcoin_Beyond · Oct 18

I want to address some of the common responses to this I've seen.

The biggest misconception about Bitcoin: “It isn’t real until it’s confirmed.”

Yesterday someone sent a transaction over a handheld radio with no internet and no phone signal. The pushback came straight away: “It doesn’t count until it settles on the blockchain.”

That objection gets something basic wrong about how commerce works, and about how Bitcoin was designed.

Accepting a payment and settling it were never the same thing.

When a shop takes a cheque, the money hasn’t moved yet. Card payments settle days later and can be reversed months later. Merchants accept them anyway, because commerce has never run on certainty. It runs on managed risk. The whitepaper says so in its first paragraph: under the existing system, “a certain percentage of fraud is accepted as unavoidable.”

Satoshi answered this in 2010.

In the “Bitcoin snack machine (fast transaction problem)” thread, he described accepting payments in seconds with “good-enough” checking. When someone pushed back, he wrote: “I didn’t say impermeable, I said good-enough,” and said the loss in practice would be “far lower than with credit cards.” He wasn’t selling a technical utopia. He was describing how real businesses work.

What the merchant actually knows offline

With Bitcoin (BSV), the customer presents the transaction along with Merkle proofs for its inputs. The merchant checks those against block headers stored on their own device. No internet is needed. In seconds they know the coins exist, they’re in the chain, and the signatures are valid.

The only remaining risk is a double-spend. Think about what that means in a physical shop. The customer is standing at your counter, on your cameras, buying something in person. Double-spending you there isn’t a clever attack on the protocol. It’s fraud, it’s a crime, and you know who did it. That’s exactly the same protection that kept cheques working for a century.

Confirmations are a dial the merchant sets, not a rule the network imposes.

Section 11 of the whitepaper works out double-spend probability as a function of how many blocks you wait. That only makes sense if the recipient chooses how long to wait. So:

- A coffee or a bus fare: accept it instantly.
- A laptop: maybe wait for the network to see it.
- A car: wait for confirmations before you hand over the keys.

Same protocol, different decisions, because the economics are different.

Where the misconception came from

Many people believe “Bitcoin needs confirmations” because BTC changed its relay policy so that unconfirmed transactions can be replaced (Replace-By-Fee). Once replacement became the norm, zero-confirmation payments stopped being trustworthy there, and a generation of users learned that waiting for blocks was the only safe option. That was a policy choice, not part of Bitcoin’s design. BSV kept the original first-seen rule, so the payment that reaches the network first is the one that counts.

The bottom line

Bitcoin was built for the real world, where there are laws, identities, cameras, reputations and courts. It was never meant to replace all of that with block confirmations. It was meant to make payments cheap, instant and final enough for the risk involved.

Offline payments on BSV aren’t a workaround. They’re the system working as Satoshi described it.

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