How does shopping with Bitcoin really work?
Love it or hate it, there is no denying that pretty much everyone you meet is going to have one opinion or another on the topic of Bitcoin.
The digital, encrypted currency that only exists on the Internet and bows to no nation. No matter what you think about it, these days more retailers, restaurants, and online shopping sites have begun opening their doors to this payment method, but how do these transactions work compared to a regular credit card?
If Person A sends some bitcoins to Person B, that transaction will have three pieces of information:
- An input – This is a record of which bitcoin address was used to send the bitcoins to Person B in the first place.
- An amount – This is the amount of bitcoins that Person A is sending to Person B.
- An output – This is Person B’s bitcoin address.
In normal Bitcoin transactions, the “miners” are responsible for the process of double checking that the receiver is being backed up by a valid “blockchain”.
The process takes about ten minutes, while this does not matter at all when shopping online for something that will take probably a week to ship, this matters when it comes to holidays, for that reason a third party should come in and pay the bill while both sides of the equation set the final amounts to reduce the transaction delay from 10 minutes to less than 10 seconds.
