You (or your wallet) decides the threshold.
Technically they are never 'confirmed', just increasingly and exponentially likely never to be double spent.
Discussion
So what are the "6 confirmations" I'm seeing on the mempool?
i.e. what are the 13 confirmations I'm seeing on this random transaction:
https://mempool.space/tx/ed6503d333627916dc25076eaa1ae9039d19b45d29fa3ea051afed4fadca7c5a
6 confirmations or blocks produced since your block which holds your txn.
The more blocks between your initial block vs the current block defines both it's consensus across the network (accepted) and the difficulty required to go back and change it.
Go further back and take a look at confirmations numbers..
I get it....
It's block height, number of mined blocks after yours.
YAAAAY
Simple enough, right?
Yeh, finally got it
Duh 😂
Here's the kicker though, 5 confirmations means it's going to take at least 50 mins minimum to confirm the txn.. now that in itself is slow AF when you have things like Algorand doing near instant finality on change.
Yeh, I'm playing with Jam on my node, it needs 5 confirmations before I can use the funds. I had just got to 6, so I'm good.
Shit, 1 hour confirmation is shit.
Imagine using mastercard or visa and only being able to validate/confirm every purchase only after an hour...
Imagine sending a billion dollars via MasterCard.
One is a settlement layer, one is a payments later.
If you're buying a Lambo or house that's fine, everything else we need layer 2's.
We're never going to buy a coffee with L1 BTC.
Therein lies the problem of trusted third parties.
Bitcoin was never meant to be in the sluggish state its in now.
Bitcoin should never have L2's and you should never have to trust a third party I.e. lighting network to do what you need to.
Trust less is meant to be just that.
Once you start questioning and DYOR, you open up a can of worms.
“Bitcoin should never have layer 2s” What kind of nonsense is that lmao. It’s been known since the beginning we would have to scale in layers
6 or 13 other nodes in the network confirming the block mined by the miner is legit and there are no double spends.
These numbers increase over time as more nodes validate/confirm.
Look at some old TXs and you'll see v high numbers of confirmations as those TXs have had more time to propagate.
I finally got it, it's number of blocks mined after your confirmed block YAAAAY
Thank you 👍