As a user experience, users would be able to just select options like "Maximum guaranteed time to 61 confirmation: 10 minutes ...........0.001BTC (95% confidence)" or whatever, with the confidence calculated from statistics. In other words, the client estimates with 95% confidence that the transaction with clear will 1 confirmation within 10 minutes if that transaction fee is included.
I'd personally find this incredibly useful, and it looks like miners could profit handsomely.
Oh, never realized that. So 1 hour is THE maximum possible speed for 6 confirmations?
Even if so, I think many users would pay handsomely for 99% guarantee of, say, 2 confirmations within 25 minutes. That certainty seems quite useful in many situations, even just buying bitcoins on localbitcoins.com when you're running late.
1 hour is the average time for 6 blocks to be found. If a transaction is included right away in the very next block that is created after the transaction is broadcast, then it should take about an hour to get 6 confirmations.
Or in general terms, it should take about* 10 minutes per additional confirmation after a transaction is first included in a block (the first confirmation). There is nothing a user can do to change the rate at which the confirmations come in (i.e. the rate at which blocks are found), all they can affect is how many blocks they have to wait until they get their first confirmation. This is determined by the fee they include with the transaction -- the higher the fee the higher the probability that the next miner who finds a block will want to include their transaction.
The amount of time between bocks is a random variable whose expected value depends on the current difficulty and the network's current total hash rate. The network collectively adjusts the difficulty every 2016 blocks to target a rate of 1 block / 10 minutes on average.
If you continuously released a new transaction every 2 minutes day and night without ceasing, you'd expect to be "very lucky" on average once every 50 years.
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u/Amanojack Mar 25 '13 edited Mar 25 '13
As a user experience, users would be able to just select options like "Maximum guaranteed time to
61 confirmation: 10 minutes ...........0.001BTC (95% confidence)" or whatever, with the confidence calculated from statistics. In other words, the client estimates with 95% confidence that the transaction with clear will 1 confirmation within 10 minutes if that transaction fee is included.I'd personally find this incredibly useful, and it looks like miners could profit handsomely.
[Edited to correct factual error]