Bitcoin Forum

waiting on a transaction:
Estimated Confirmation Time   Within 6 Blocks (Medium Priority)

my question is how long does it take the bitcoin community to mine 1 block
how long will this transaction take?

so i might have to wait 36 hours for the transaction
if it says "within 6 blocks" can it be even in the next block or is it highly unprobable

The bigger factor besides changing difficulty is that it's an average time.
There might not be a new block for over an hour, or there might be 3 in the next 10 minutes.
Also, blockchains "within 6 blocks" is sometimes very inacurate.

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"6 every hour" doesn't mean one block each 6 hours, it means the average block time is 10 minutes, resulting in an average of 6 new blocks mined each hour.
Yes, your transaction might be included in the next block, but it's also possible the transaction might not be included in any of the next 6 or even X blocks.

So in other words it might be in a few minutes and it can take all the way up to a few days :)
this is a very different span
wish there was a more accurate way to know like to be able to follow the trasaction where exactly it is at which stage etc....
is there such a tool?

Included In Blocks   401094 ( 2016-03-04 08:40:41 + 29 minutes )

payment came through after 29 minutes
i still want to know is there a way to track ?

like where it is standing
so there are miners there are trasactions
is there a way to see where my transaction is
say like when you order via ebay , it you can see where the package is left the area left the state international flisght etc...
a more detailed way of seeing where the transaction is

The blockchain isn't Fedex. There is no "progression" on an unconfirmed transaction.
An unconfirmed transaction is waiting to be included in a block, that's "where it is".

If your transaction is in high priority assuming that the network is not under attack or isnt full of transaction then your transaction will be included in the next block or it could be the block after that . Sometimes it takes longer even in high priority , thats totally depends on your miners fee however if you include a high miners fee then 99 % of the time it will always be included in the next block

Currently I am not aware of any service that show this. But from a user interface perspective, I agree with the OP .

One way is to rank the transaction in mempool according to fees in satoshi/byte
or by priority. User should be able to see where his transaction is in the queue.
If the transaction is at the end of the queue it has very less probability of getting confirmed.

The closest thing to anything like that (I know of) would be the wait profile (https://bitcoinfees.github.io/misc/profile/).
You don't get a listing "where in the queque" your transaction stands (because there isn't a ranking #1-#5k or something like that anyways),
but you get an expected wait time, according to your fee rate.

you need an average of 1 hour for in deep confirmation, to be 100% safe, but not safe from the infamous 51% attack

The mining process is effectively random, and in any given second there is approximately a 1 in 600 chance that a block will be "solved".

There is no progress made towards this goal.  The first attempt is just as likely to succeed as the ten thousandth attempt which is just as likely to succeed as the 100 billionth.

As an analogy to help you relate to what's happening...

Imagine that I create a "puzzle" that says "Randomly roll six dice together every half a second until the results on all six dice are a 1."

On average, this puzzle will complete in a bit more than 10 minutes (the actual average is 648 seconds).  However, you could get it on the first try, and it could take you several hours.  There is no "progress" made.  You are never any closer to success than when you started.  As a matter of fact, if you've been trying for 30 minutes, and you haven't succeeded yet, on average it will still take 648 more seconds.

This is essentially how the "mining" process works.  Miners are given a target (in the analogy the target was all six 1's on the dice, in mining the target is a SHA256 hash value that is lower than a given integer value). They repeat a process that has effectively random results as fast as they can as many times as they can until one of the miners get lucky enough to have a result that meets the target.

Every 2016 blocks the protocol checks to see if the difficulty target needs to be adjusted. If blocks are occurring too fast (took less than 20160 minutes), the target value is set even lower to make it take longer for someone to get lucky enough. If blocks are occurring too slow (took more than 20160 minutes), the target value is set higher to make it take shorter time for someone to get lucky enough.

The solo miner (or mining pool) gets to choose which transactions they want to include in their block.  To be "confirmed" a transaction needs to be in successful block.  The miner/pool is limited to 1 megabyte of transactions in their block.  The miner/pool gets to keep the transaction fees of any transaction they include in their block. So, if there are more than 1 megabyte worth of transactions waiting around to be confirmed, the typical miner/pool will choose the transactions that pay the highest fee per byte (since that will maximize their revenue).

Therefore, if you pay a sufficiently high enough transaction fee your transaction is likely to be included in the next block that is solved.  If you don't pay a high enough fee, you'll need to wait for a while until there are less than a megabyte of transactions that pay a higher fee-per-byte than you.