What do confirmations mean? If your transaction is confirmed is it guaranteed?

[DannyHamilton]

I keep telling myself that I will read the white paper and won't stop until I understand at least 60% of it, but I never get to it, lol.

It is only 8 pages long and has lots of pictures.  It isn't filled with overly technical language.  Take an hour and look at it.  You'll probably be pleasantly surprised and wonder why you didn't look at it sooner.

[readerbtc]

I keep telling myself that I will read the white paper and won't stop until I understand at least 60% of it, but I never get to it, lol.

It is only 8 pages long and has lots of pictures.  It isn't filled with overly technical language.  Take an hour and look at it.  You'll probably be pleasantly surprised and wonder why you didn't look at it sooner.

^ this

[nahtnam]

For the most part, transactions that have been broadcast to the network with 0 confirmations are pretty much assured to "go through."

In order to successfully broadcast a fraudulent transaction, one must have a warehouse worth of computing power at his disposal, and a hell of a ton of luck.

This is totally untrue.  You are mixing up two totally different topics.  Please do not do that as you will just confuse yourself and everyone else.

Topic one:  a 0 confirmation double spend
Topic two:  a 51% attack on the Bitcoin network

Since this thread is about confirmations and not about network attacks I will not address a 51% attack here except to fix your comment and say it does not belong in this thread:

In order to successfully broadcast a fraudulent transaction launch a 51% attack on the Bitcoin network, one must have a warehouse worth of computing power at his disposal, and a hell of a ton of luck.

Now, fixing the rest of your comment:

For the most part, transactions that have been broadcast to the network with 0 confirmations are pretty much assured to "go through" unless the sender does a 0 confirmation double spend.

A double/multiple spend is very simple if you have two or more vendors that accept your BTC with zero confirmation and instantly ship you the product.  Here is how you do it:

You have an unspent output of 1 BTC
You send it to the first vendor's address, they accept the coin with 0 confirmations and ship you the product.
Now you have about 10 minute before the transaction is put in a block and gets the first confirmation
So, you simply log into the second vendor site and send the same coin to them, they also accept the coin with no confirmation and send you the product.
See?  You can spend that same coin as many times as you want.

Eventually one of the spends will get confirmed and all the other spends of the same coin will get dropped.

One vendor will get paid, all the rest are screwed because they have shipped the product and got nothing for it.

Will the first transaction get a conformation of some random one? If its the first on then simply send it to yourself first and the to other vendors so that you can keep your coin too!