Is there an average confirmation time based on number of connections to the bitcoin network or network speed?
Is there a reasonable expectation I can place on the confirmation time. If so what factors can increase/decrease this expectation?
What can affect the variation time? Active connections? Personal hardware? Transfer amount?
Actually the average confirmation time should be about 10 minutes, but it varies a lot. It can be 1 minute or 1 hour.
It isn't much affected by your connection (maybe some seconds, unless your connections are zero of course), but it's affected by other things:
- the fee included/coin age/bytesize/transfer amount -> priority of your transaction to be included in the next block (-> confirmation)
- the connection of the miners
- tendency of the network hasing power for mining (going up->less confirmation, because more blocks are found)