What’s the story with the whole six confirmations? Isn’t one is as good as six? 🐶🐾🤔

Reply to this note

Please Login to reply.

Discussion

there was some calculation involving computing power.

most services I've seen accept one.

Used to be six when the network was smaller

yep

But why 6? Why not 5 or 7 🐶🐾🤔

Yeah that’s probably a better answer that I can give I am #tarded

Thank you both! This finally made sense in the most logical way. Second answer is what I was after 🐶🐾🫂

One or two blocks could get replaced by someone mining three to make a longer chain but I think after 6 is pretty much always impossible. It’s science. 🧪 🧬

I think it's just degrees of probabilities.

Like in physics they want not just 5% margin of error on an experiment, but more like 0.05% and then repeated

So we are talking about 6 blocks past, which means that the TX is 6 blocks in the past or about an hour, right? Is it all about propagation? 🐶🐾🤔

in around 2013 or 2015 era when forked happened few people were successfully able to double spend BTC quietly heard.

Thanks, already read the answer that made sense. It’s apparently in the white paper 🐶🐾🤣

The main point is to protect from blockchain reorganization

River has a decent write-up 👇

https://river.com/learn/terms/r/reorganization/

another far less likely vulnerability would be double spends which become exponentially more difficult after each confirmation.

Thank you! 🐶🐾🫂💜

Imagine a chain tip that looks like (A, B, C) where C represents the most recent block, and the one in which your transaction was included. Suppose next that a miner who had been working with (A, B) looking for C shortly after finds a different block, C‘. Should/could/will the next miner to find a block D build on C or C prime? If they build on C‘, your tx is no longer included in the longest chain. c, containing your block is an "orphan block". This is a simple version of a "chain reorganization". The 6 block rule of thumb seeks to minimize this probability (that your tx is reorged away)

https://learnmeabitcoin.com/technical/chain-reorganisation