Will confirmations be faster, the more people become part of the network?

[ParsnipCommander]

almost getting there.  

[alani123]

Confirmations have to do with the miners fee. If you use a wallet other than Bitcoin Core (aka Qt) you can skip 100% of the fee. But since miners are rewarded with the fee to verify transactions if you pay a large fee for a transaction it means it's going to get verifications faster.

[Farmer17]

I'm still figuring this out... almost getting there. 

Just wondering... as the network gets larger - and more people use bitcoin, larger mining operations happen... will bitcoin be faster to confirm? 

Short-term, possible.
Long-term, nope.

Bitcoin difficulty adjusts every 2016 blocks to bring the expected block time back to 10 minutes.
If the network hashrate doubles suddenly, the average time to get a block will be halved, but it will be back to 10 minutes soon.

[Farmer17]

Confirmations have to do with the miners fee. If you use a wallet other than Bitcoin Core (aka Qt) you can skip 100% of the fee. But since miners are rewarded with the fee to verify transactions if you pay a large fee for a transaction it means it's going to get verifications faster.

AFAIK, if you pay a larger fee, your tx will get a higher chance to get accepted in the next block (high incentive for miners to include your tx).
But unless in extreme situation, putting a min fee is enough.

[pinksheep]

What about the problem that BTC can only cope with so many transactions a second (can't remember exactly how many offhand)  - can
that be overcome?

[SelbyTsang]

What about the problem that BTC can only cope with so many transactions a second (can't remember exactly how many offhand)  - can
that be overcome?

Currently the maximum block size is 1MB. With average 10 minutes a block, it is about 7 transactions per second.
You can find more info here. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=352118.0

[DiamondCardz]

Like DeathAndTaxes states on that thread, 1MB is a limit which can be raised. If the block limit was to be raised we would be able to confirm much more transactions per block, however this does come with repercussions - less nodes due to larger blocks, fees might be dropped for miners as there is less competition, et cetera.

[activebiz]

I pay a 0.0001 fee per tx and it always shows as high priority, and confirms in a few minutes

[ParsnipCommander]

WHAT!!!!!!???

[SelbyTsang]

What about the problem that BTC can only cope with so many transactions a second (can't remember exactly how many offhand)  - can
that be overcome?

Currently the maximum block size is 1MB. With average 10 minutes a block, it is about 7 transactions per second.
You can find more info here. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=352118.0

WHAT!!!!!!???

Only 7? 

Yes, the limit is 7 tps now.
But, the current situation is, we are not even close to that.
You can find that the average block size now is still lower than 300 KB on https://blockr.io/charts while the limit is 1 MB.

[ParsnipCommander]

Yes, the limit is 7 tps now.
But, the current situation is, we are not even close to that.
You can find that the average block size now is still lower than 300 KB on https://blockr.io/charts while the limit is 1 MB.

Very nice site. Its nice to see the total transactions increasing in the past year

[ellen_me]

The fee per transaction is so low compared to other sites like Paypal.
Also faster even with such low fee.