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I thought one can directly send bitcoin to another address without the need for a middleman?



Yes, but dollars and euro and yens almost always require a middleman, unless you're doing cash exchange.


Ah, I did not realise that this was about a "transformation" between bitcoin and normal money. But in that case wouldn't it make sense to keep the money on the exchange just as long as needed?


The bitcoin exchanges typically require 6 confirmations of a transaction in the block chain before crediting your account with bitcoins. This takes about 1 hour.

If you are speculating on bitcoins and you hear about some news that might cause the price to drop, then you don't want to wait 1 hour before you can sell them.


Can you offer more money for the verification, to get it done faster? I think the default is 0.01 BTC, so if you offer 0.05 BTC will you get priority?


At the moment even no-fee transactions usually make it onto the block chain as quickly as possible. The ~1 hour (6 block) confirmation time is due to the recipient being cautious that the sender won't try to double-spend the money by rewriting history with lots of computation power. As more time elapses from when the transaction occurred, this becomes harder, and not as a function of your transaction fees.


The transaction fee only helps get it into the first block sooner. It does nothing for the X confirmations after the first.


Of course one can. But what he's talking about are large-scale exchanges, where one makes transactions with funds deposited directly on the exchange.




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