'The receiver of a payment must wait an hour or so before believing that it’s valid. The network will resolve any possible double-spend races by then.'
Satoshi Nakamoto
#wisdom #philosophy #psychology #spirituality #poetry
Discussion
Does an on-chain #Bitcoin transaction really take this long? (I've only used lightning so far)
Depending on mempool fees and what you accepted for a fee rate in said transaction as well as the wallet anyway that said usually takes 10 min up to 24 hours from my experience
Yes, finding solutions is a poisson point process, like radioactive decay, it averages 10 min per block but varies from 1 second to two hours, and the distribution is extremely fuzzy
Most of the time, 6 blocks = 1 hour and that is the point at which the probability of another chain, and contrary transaction from the same UTXO replacing it is basically zero.
There have been very very few cases where a side chain leaped ahead of more than 3 blocks divergent, thus many onchain payment services allow 3 confirmations... Probably less than as many years it's been running.