Why does it take so long to confirm?

[Fiora]

So I guess .1 is small?

I guess anything 1 btc below is slow as hell.  Cause I waited for my .1 bet and came in so late.

No it's not. 1 confirmation for .1BTC should be enough. You were just unlucky, the miners didn't find blocks for a whole hour.

Damn, I was going to say isnt .1 big? But that unlucky part, does that happen a lot? I`m new to all this so every input would help.

How often does this happen when you have to wait for a whole hour?

Or would he has to enter .11 or something?

When this happens, it is not because of the fee. No matter how big of a fee was included in the transaction, sometimes miners just don't solve a block for a long time -- like an hour or more. Other times you might get two blocks in 5 minutes. It doesn't happen often in my experience.

Oh okay. So pretty much its super rare that would happen to anyone. 

Thanks for helping me understand a bit.

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[ShameOnYou]

So I guess .1 is small?

I guess anything 1 btc below is slow as hell.  Cause I waited for my .1 bet and came in so late.

No it's not. 1 confirmation for .1BTC should be enough. You were just unlucky, the miners didn't find blocks for a whole hour.

Damn, I was going to say isnt .1 big? But that unlucky part, does that happen a lot? I`m new to all this so every input would help.

How often does this happen when you have to wait for a whole hour?

Or would he has to enter .11 or something?

When this happens, it is not because of the fee. No matter how big of a fee was included in the transaction, sometimes miners just don't solve a block for a long time -- like an hour or more. Other times you might get two blocks in 5 minutes. It doesn't happen often in my experience.

Oh okay. So pretty much its super rare that would happen to anyone. 

Thanks for helping me understand a bit.

No, I wouldn't say it's super rare. It will definitely happen from time to time. I just wouldn't call it the norm. The norm would probably be ~ 10 minutes per confirmation.

[Mobius7]

So I guess .1 is small?

I guess anything 1 btc below is slow as hell.  Cause I waited for my .1 bet and came in so late.

No it's not. 1 confirmation for .1BTC should be enough. You were just unlucky, the miners didn't find blocks for a whole hour.

Damn, I was going to say isnt .1 big? But that unlucky part, does that happen a lot? I`m new to all this so every input would help.

How often does this happen when you have to wait for a whole hour?

Or would he has to enter .11 or something?

When this happens, it is not because of the fee. No matter how big of a fee was included in the transaction, sometimes miners just don't solve a block for a long time -- like an hour or more. Other times you might get two blocks in 5 minutes. It doesn't happen often in my experience.

Oh okay. So pretty much its super rare that would happen to anyone. 

Thanks for helping me understand a bit.

No, I wouldn't say it's super rare. It will definitely happen from time to time. I just wouldn't call it the norm. The norm would probably be ~ 10 minutes per confirmation.

For the probabilities and statistics of time between blocks, you may refer to the following post.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=583081.msg6386925#msg6386925

[Argwai96]

I will say, long confirmation time came in handy once when I was trying to panic sell during a crash. By the time my coins got there, the price had bounced and we were flying back up. 

[junshong]

Typically, a transaction takes 10 minutes on average to confirm and any other blocks mined after that will increase your confirmation.

[CEG5952]

Typically, a transaction takes 10 minutes on average to confirm and any other blocks mined after that will increase your confirmation.

Except when it takes *forever*

It's true, 10 minutes is the norm, but somehow, I seem to often manage to wait at least 20-30 minutes for my first confirmation. But I don't send too often either, so it's a small sample size.

[DolanDuck]

Typically, a transaction takes 10 minutes on average to confirm and any other blocks mined after that will increase your confirmation.

Except when it takes *forever*

It's true, 10 minutes is the norm, but somehow, I seem to often manage to wait at least 20-30 minutes for my first confirmation. But I don't send too often either, so it's a small sample size.

Sometimes it's not bitcoin fault but if you are withdrawing coins from an exchange, it couldn't be automatic so it will take 10 minutes + "x" support minutes.
This seems basic to most people here, but it's better to explain it to newcomers in the crypto coins.

[CEG5952]

Typically, a transaction takes 10 minutes on average to confirm and any other blocks mined after that will increase your confirmation.

Except when it takes *forever*

It's true, 10 minutes is the norm, but somehow, I seem to often manage to wait at least 20-30 minutes for my first confirmation. But I don't send too often either, so it's a small sample size.

Sometimes it's not bitcoin fault but if you are withdrawing coins from an exchange, it couldn't be automatic so it will take 10 minutes + "x" support minutes.
This seems basic to most people here, but it's better to explain it to newcomers in the crypto coins.

Since this was in response to me: No, I am not including the time from when I request withdrawal until sent (i.e. from an exchange). Most of the time, I am just sending from my blockchain wallet.

[junshong]

Typically, a transaction takes 10 minutes on average to confirm and any other blocks mined after that will increase your confirmation.

Except when it takes *forever*

It's true, 10 minutes is the norm, but somehow, I seem to often manage to wait at least 20-30 minutes for my first confirmation. But I don't send too often either, so it's a small sample size.

It depends on the luck, some takes a long time. The exchange may not be broadcasting your transaction immediately, check if it appears on the blockchain already.

[Kprawn]

Well an hour is till better than using a credit card.

Some merchants have reported, receiving credit card payments, and then a reversal, days after the transaction took place.

That sounds more risky to me.

[boraf]

Higher commission will speed up the process.

[aboo]

Some require a bigger miner fee, if I`m guessing right.

[fatguyyyyy]

There should be a youtube video on this, for newbies to not panic about their bitcoin.

I can imagine shitting bricks, if I sent someone a large amount the 1st time, like at a localbitcoins on-hand transaction.

And drama starts to happen because of no confirmation.

[DolanDuck]

10 minutes is the average time taken to find a block. It can be significantly more or less time than that depending on luck; 10 minutes is simply the average case.

Blocks (shown as "confirmations" in the GUI) are how the Bitcoin achieves consensus on who owns what. Once a block is found everyone agrees that you now own those coins, so you can spend them again. Until then it's possible that some network nodes believe otherwise, if somebody is attempting to defraud the system by reversing a transaction. The more confirmations a transaction has, the less risk there is of a reversal. Only 6 blocks or 1 hour is enough to make reversal computationally impractical. This is dramatically better than credit cards which can see chargebacks occur up to three months after the original transaction!

Ten minutes was specifically chosen by Satoshi as a tradeoff between first confirmation time and the amount of work wasted due to chain splits. After a block is mined, it takes time for other miners to find out about it, and until then they are actually competing against the new block instead of adding to it. If someone mines another new block based on the old block chain, the network can only accept one of the two, and all the work that went into the other block gets wasted. For example, if it takes miners 1 minute on average to learn about new blocks, and new blocks come every 10 minutes, then the overall network is wasting about 10% of its work. Lengthening the time between blocks reduces this waste.

As a thought experiment, what if the Bitcoin network grew to include Mars? From the farthest points in their orbits, it takes about 20 minutes for a signal to travel from Earth to Mars. With only 10 minutes between new blocks, miners on Mars would always be 2 blocks behind the miners on Earth. It would be almost impossible for them to contribute to the block chain. If we wanted collaborate with those kinds of delays, we would need at least a few hours between new blocks.

[ranochigo]

Some require a bigger miner fee, if I`m guessing right.

Yes, if your transaction size is smaller than 1,000 bytes, it needs to be sent with fees. If your outputs of your transactions is more than 0.01, you need not include a fee. Look at this page: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transaction_fees

[PilotofBTC]

Some require a bigger miner fee, if I`m guessing right.

Yes, if your transaction size is smaller than 1,000 bytes, it needs to be sent with fees. If your outputs of your transactions is more than 0.01, you need not include a fee. Look at this page: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transaction_fees

Should all wallets be calculating the correct fee? Isn't that the point of the "reference" wallet?

[bangi]

Just curious, if bitcoin takes sometimes like 1 hr of confirmations.

Do other coins beat this ability? or is it for alt coins as well.

[PilotofBTC]

Just curious, if bitcoin takes sometimes like 1 hr of confirmations.

Do other coins beat this ability? or is it for alt coins as well.

90% of the alt-coins are a fork of Bitcoin. The only changes are generally block time and block reward. It seems most alt-coins have a 60 second block time. I'm not sure how that converts to the security wrt 6 confirms.

I guess the alt-coin devs don't expect a miner on mars, or even the moon any time soon. Although, I hear the BTC block chain is, or will soon be on the ISS.

[bangi]

Just curious, if bitcoin takes sometimes like 1 hr of confirmations.

Do other coins beat this ability? or is it for alt coins as well.

90% of the alt-coins are a fork of Bitcoin. The only changes are generally block time and block reward. It seems most alt-coins have a 60 second block time. I'm not sure how that converts to the security wrt 6 confirms.

I guess the alt-coin devs don't expect a miner on mars, or even the moon any time soon. Although, I hear the BTC block chain is, or will soon be on the ISS.

Oh okay, so same traits as for alt coins.

I was just curious, yeah the miners for bitcoin.. lol. such a hassle.

[bitsmichel]

Confirmation time really depends. I had transactions which had 1-2 confirmations in 3 minutes, and transactions where I waited for around 10 minutes.  When this a big transaction it really does get on your nerves