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Date: Sun, 15 Feb 2015 23:40:24 +0200
From: Adam Gibson <ekaggata@gmail.com>
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Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] replace-by-fee v0.10.0rc4
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On 02/15/2015 11:25 PM, Troy Benjegerdes wrote:
> 
> Most money/payment systems include some method to reverse or undo 
> payments made in error. In these systems, the longer settlement
> times you mention below are a feature, not a bug, and give more
> time for a human to react to errors and system failures.
> 

Settlement has to be final somewhere. That is the whole point of it.
Transfer costs in current electronic payment systems are a direct
consequence of their non-finality. That's the point Satoshi was making
in the introduction to the whitepaper: "With the possibility of
reversal, the need for trust spreads".

There is nothing wrong with having reversible mechanisms built on top
of Bitcoin, and indeed it makes sense for most activity to happen at
those higher layers. It's easy to build things that way, but
impossible to build them the other way: you can't build a
non-reversible layer on top of a reversible layer.