How long does it takes to confirm a transaction?

Meni Rosenfeld

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Quote from: deepceleron on July 15, 2012, 05:39:44 AM

The answer is six Bitcoin transaction blocks. The official Bitcoin client considers newly received bitcoins to be "trustworthy" (and then marked as confirmed and added to the account balance) after the payment is included in a block, and then five further block chain blocks have been built upon the one containing the transaction.

No, the term "confirmed", and inclusion in the balance in the standard client, are after just 1 block.

What the standard client does do is put a nice "V" icon near a 6-confirmations transaction. Ascribing magical properties to the 6-confirmations mark is archaic, it really depends on the nature of the transaction. 2 is enough for almost all transactions.

deepceleron

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The answer is six Bitcoin transaction blocks. The official Bitcoin client considers newly received bitcoins to be "trustworthy" (and then marked as confirmed and added to the account balance) after the payment is included in a block, and then five further block chain blocks have been built upon the one containing the transaction. It takes an average of about 10 minutes for a new transaction block to be generated, so about an hour. However, with the current resilience and high mining difficulty, after a transaction has been included in the first block, there are few scenarios that would make the payment invalid or prevent the transaction from being permanently included in the block chain, and these would take a significant double-spend attack attempt by the sender.

Meni Rosenfeld

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Quote from: cst on July 14, 2012, 12:54:53 PM

Quote from: knight22 on July 14, 2012, 12:49:31 PM

So for what I understand now is that I cannot make another transaction before the last one have been confirmed?

If you have no other funds, no. Coins need to be confirmed if you want to send them out.

By protocol you can send unconfirmed coins and the two transactions can appear in the same block, whether the client will allow you to do this depends on the particular client (the standard client doesn't).

Quote from: knight22 on July 14, 2012, 12:56:54 PM

But blockchain.net/wallet doesn't allow me to make a transaction actually, and for what I see, the transaction just before to the same wallet is not confirmed

I suppose you mean blockchain.info. Presumably it's waiting for a confirmation or several before allowing spending, but I'm not very familiar with it.

knight22

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--------------->¿?

But blockchain.net/wallet doesn't allow me to make a transaction actually, and for what I see, the transaction just before to the same wallet is not confirmed

cst

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The Cosmos doesn't care about you.

Quote from: knight22 on July 14, 2012, 12:49:31 PM

So for what I understand now is that I cannot make another transaction before the last one have been confirmed?

If you have no other funds, no. Coins need to be confirmed if you want to send them out.

knight22

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So for what I understand now is that I cannot make another transaction before the last one have been confirmed?

cst

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The Cosmos doesn't care about you.

As long as it takes to put it in a block by miner that solved it. Usually around 10 minutes.
Could take longer if you haven't paid a fee (no incentive for miners to process it).

Raoul Duke

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As soon as a miner includes it in a block.

knight22