Topic: Why does it take so long to confirm? (Read 2101 times)

its sometimes insanely slow, coz some btc rounds can be long, takes you down sometimes, especialy if you are trying to arb prices on multiple exchanges
just bare with it, it will get confirmed

cheers

Most exchanges will require a transaction to have at least 6 confirmations prior to confirming a deposit. This is to allow them to mitigate the risk that the chain that contains the transaction does not get orphaned. It is very similar to waiting for a check to clear but the process takes on average one hour verses days or possibly weeks for checks.

some require only 3. i trade on bitfinex, and when i deposited coins from cold storage, i remember them being available after 3 confirmations. it's possible i'm remembering wrong though.... cryptsy can take like 20 confirmations because their system/db is so slow.

Generally speaking most exchanges require at least 6 confirmations before the BTC will be available.

Indeed, the block times follow exponential distribution.
So, after waiting for 5 minutes, the expected time to find the next block doesn't change at all.

It also depends on when you send the transaction. If you send it seconds after the last block then you are probably going to have to wait ~10 mins for your first confirm. If you send ~9 minutes after that last block, then you are probably going to only wait ~1 mins for your first confirm.

If you trust the network then you shouldn't be nervous about it. once your tx shows on the blockchain you can be sure it will be confirmed.

Confirmation time really depends. I had transactions which had 1-2 confirmations in 3 minutes, and transactions where I waited for around 10 minutes.  When this a big transaction it really does get on your nerves

Oh okay, so same traits as for alt coins.

I was just curious, yeah the miners for bitcoin.. lol. such a hassle.

90% of the alt-coins are a fork of Bitcoin. The only changes are generally block time and block reward. It seems most alt-coins have a 60 second block time. I'm not sure how that converts to the security wrt 6 confirms.

I guess the alt-coin devs don't expect a miner on mars, or even the moon any time soon. Although, I hear the BTC block chain is, or will soon be on the ISS.

Just curious, if bitcoin takes sometimes like 1 hr of confirmations.

Do other coins beat this ability? or is it for alt coins as well.

Should all wallets be calculating the correct fee? Isn't that the point of the "reference" wallet?

Yes, if your transaction size is smaller than 1,000 bytes, it needs to be sent with fees. If your outputs of your transactions is more than 0.01, you need not include a fee. Look at this page: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transaction_fees

10 minutes is the average time taken to find a block. It can be significantly more or less time than that depending on luck; 10 minutes is simply the average case.

Blocks (shown as "confirmations" in the GUI) are how the Bitcoin achieves consensus on who owns what. Once a block is found everyone agrees that you now own those coins, so you can spend them again. Until then it's possible that some network nodes believe otherwise, if somebody is attempting to defraud the system by reversing a transaction. The more confirmations a transaction has, the less risk there is of a reversal. Only 6 blocks or 1 hour is enough to make reversal computationally impractical. This is dramatically better than credit cards which can see chargebacks occur up to three months after the original transaction!

Ten minutes was specifically chosen by Satoshi as a tradeoff between first confirmation time and the amount of work wasted due to chain splits. After a block is mined, it takes time for other miners to find out about it, and until then they are actually competing against the new block instead of adding to it. If someone mines another new block based on the old block chain, the network can only accept one of the two, and all the work that went into the other block gets wasted. For example, if it takes miners 1 minute on average to learn about new blocks, and new blocks come every 10 minutes, then the overall network is wasting about 10% of its work. Lengthening the time between blocks reduces this waste.

As a thought experiment, what if the Bitcoin network grew to include Mars? From the farthest points in their orbits, it takes about 20 minutes for a signal to travel from Earth to Mars. With only 10 minutes between new blocks, miners on Mars would always be 2 blocks behind the miners on Earth. It would be almost impossible for them to contribute to the block chain. If we wanted collaborate with those kinds of delays, we would need at least a few hours between new blocks.

There should be a youtube video on this, for newbies to not panic about their bitcoin.

I can imagine shitting bricks, if I sent someone a large amount the 1st time, like at a localbitcoins on-hand transaction.

And drama starts to happen because of no confirmation.

Some require a bigger miner fee, if I`m guessing right.

Higher commission will speed up the process.

Well an hour is till better than using a credit card.

Some merchants have reported, receiving credit card payments, and then a reversal, days after the transaction took place.

That sounds more risky to me.

It depends on the luck, some takes a long time. The exchange may not be broadcasting your transaction immediately, check if it appears on the blockchain already.

Since this was in response to me: No, I am not including the time from when I request withdrawal until sent (i.e. from an exchange). Most of the time, I am just sending from my blockchain wallet.

Sometimes it's not bitcoin fault but if you are withdrawing coins from an exchange, it couldn't be automatic so it will take 10 minutes + "x" support minutes.
This seems basic to most people here, but it's better to explain it to newcomers in the crypto coins.