Can someone explain in further details how the 6 confirmations work to prevent your Tx from being in a stale block? If the average block takes 10 mins to mine, then there a 1 hour waiting period for my transaction? I don’t understand why I have to wait for 6 new blocked to be mined.
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Hi Roy.
Will try to explain this shortly.
To be able to understand why you usually need to wait an hour or so to be sure that your transaction is confirmed, you need to understand about stale blocks, since you already mentioned them I think that you have done your research.
Remember that the miners and the nodes are distributed all over the world and they are not updated at once when a new block is mined. So it is possible that versions of a new chain can grow at different zones on the world.
But inevitably at some point one chain will be longer than other. And then is when the consensus algorithm apply choosing the longest one as the truth one.
So basically you need to wait that time to be sure that all the nodes and miners of the world agree that the block where your transaction was included is “printed in stone”, included forever on the longest chain.
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Because the odds that there will be 2 miners finding a block at the same time 6 times in a row is very low.
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cryptoGerry,
Thanks for responding. I really appreciate this.
I understand now.
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Mauro,
Thank you very much. This makes a lot of sense from a probability point of view.
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