But would the customer who wants to pay wth BitC using NFC technology accept that he must wait for some confirmations before he can take his merchandize home? And would merchants, especially large stores that go to substantive effort to streamline checkout processes, accept a payment protocol that by design adds a one hour delay (IIRC, people seem to regard six confirmations as definitive proof of payment, and the work factor is adjusted to give one confirmation per ten minutes on average) to every checkout? Even requiring just one confirmation would mean that a supermarket cashier could only process about four or five customers per hour if you want to keep the process sequential.
why would you use bitcoin below that though? requiring a both vendor and customer have an account at some paypal like site just makes it paypal. it will have the same problems. so what does bitcoin add? nothing
Right. People tend to forget that bitcoin is just the base layer, the first step. Like the kernel would be to an OS. Its goal is to support sending value from A to B reliably. All kinds of functionality needed to run a full-fledged economy can be built on-top without affecting the core system too much. For example using Open Transactions.
