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<p>Bitcoin is the most widely used cryptocurrency on permissionless blockchains, with both its popularity and daily transaction volume growing rapidly. However, sellers typically wait for six block confirmations–about one hour–before considering a transaction final. This long confirmation time makes Bitcoin impractical for micropayments and other applications that require fast transaction validation. In this paper, we present “Q_pay,” a protocol designed to expedite the validation of Bitcoin payments. We demonstrate that the Q_pay protocol ensures secure and guaranteed payments while providing fast service to buyers once a “committee” approves the Q_pay transaction. This approach addresses the limitations of layer-2 scaling solutions, as Q_pay does not require users to deposit collateral on the main chain. A subset of committee members with mining capabilities produces a dedicated Q_block, whose mining difficulty is intentionally low, resulting in substantially faster block generation compared to regular Bitcoin blocks. Our solution is tailored for micropayments, ensuring that the requested service or product becomes accessible to the customer within seconds. We analyzed the security of the Q_pay protocol using the UC framework. We evaluated Q_pay using 600 Bitcoin nodes on an emulated network. The results show that the Q_pay protocol is highly efficient, with an approval latency of 0.37&#xa0;s for a committee of 16 members and 0.91&#xa0;s for a committee of 512 members. The Q_pay protocol demonstrates that the Bitcoin blockchain can facilitate secure and nearly instant (&lt;1&#xa0;s) micropayments.</p>

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Q_pay: A Low-Latency Bitcoin Micropayment Protocol for Instant Service Access

  • 期刊论文

  • 发表日期：

    2026年5月13日

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  • Prerna Arote,
  • Joy Kuri

摘要

Bitcoin is the most widely used cryptocurrency on permissionless blockchains, with both its popularity and daily transaction volume growing rapidly. However, sellers typically wait for six block confirmations–about one hour–before considering a transaction final. This long confirmation time makes Bitcoin impractical for micropayments and other applications that require fast transaction validation. In this paper, we present “Q_pay,” a protocol designed to expedite the validation of Bitcoin payments. We demonstrate that the Q_pay protocol ensures secure and guaranteed payments while providing fast service to buyers once a “committee” approves the Q_pay transaction. This approach addresses the limitations of layer-2 scaling solutions, as Q_pay does not require users to deposit collateral on the main chain. A subset of committee members with mining capabilities produces a dedicated Q_block, whose mining difficulty is intentionally low, resulting in substantially faster block generation compared to regular Bitcoin blocks. Our solution is tailored for micropayments, ensuring that the requested service or product becomes accessible to the customer within seconds. We analyzed the security of the Q_pay protocol using the UC framework. We evaluated Q_pay using 600 Bitcoin nodes on an emulated network. The results show that the Q_pay protocol is highly efficient, with an approval latency of 0.37 s for a committee of 16 members and 0.91 s for a committee of 512 members. The Q_pay protocol demonstrates that the Bitcoin blockchain can facilitate secure and nearly instant (<1 s) micropayments.