When a hash is submitted that "solves" the block, then it is basically 1 of the 6 confirmations.
There isn't a thing like 6 confirmations. That number is an arbirtrary one. You need one confirmation for the transaction to be confirmed and anything else above that adds security for orphan blocks, network attacks etc.
6 doesn't mean anything else than that your transactions are more secured from having 5 confirmations and less secured from having 7.
Truth. I'm just going off of an explanation that could correlate to the Bitcoin-qt wallet that shows "broadcasting" and then 0/6 confirms, etc. It keeps getting confirmed everytime a block is found.
I guess it's just hard because a "simple" explanation of how Bitcoin operates doesn't really exist. lol
The block is basically a list of new transactions (new as in since the previous block). Each transaction is already confirmed in one sense - it has the signature of the owner(s) of the bitcoins that are going into it (i.e. the signatures of whoever's spending in that transaction). But this is only one level of confirmation - confirmation that, up to the last block, those signature owners still had those bitcoins. The problem would be that those owners could spend the same bitcoins into more than one transaction. That's the point of the blockchain; it creates one uniquely valid version of history - the only valid transaction history is the one in the longest chain of blocks. If two different blocks are created simultaneously, with the spending happening more than once, one of those blocks will become "orphaned" and ignored.
Helping?
This is much more eloquent.
