In the previous post, I explored the timing of individual blocks. Generally, 6 blocks are used to confirm a transaction. This attempts to mitigate the possibility of the transaction being included in an orphaned block as a result of a fork caused by two blocks being found concurrently and to act as security against a malicious actor with considerable hashing power reverting previously mined blocks. A block is considered immutable after 6 confirmations.

While the previous analysis showed blocks in recent years may take up to 2 hours and 19 minutes, the chances of 6 constitutive blocks taking a similar amount of time is considered highly unlikely.


A snapshot of block headers was taken at block 763308 (15th November 2022) and an analysis of rolling 6 block timing was completed.

The average 6-block confirmation time over the entire history of the blockchain was 3436 seconds (57 minutes, 16 seconds). Closely aligned to the target time of 3600 seconds (60 minutes); 6x target block time of 10 minutes.

Over the past 5 full years – 2016 to 2021 – the longest 6-block confirmation time was just over 6 hours in 2021. This was exceptional, with other years being around 4 hours. If you were lucky enough to be awaiting your transaction confirmation during the shortest period in these years you could have been waiting for as little as 2 minutes (2020)!

Year2009201020112012201320142015
Block Range0-6 74637-74643149092-149098208508-208514215900-215906297493-297499386679-386685
Max
(seconds)
465284267891562414392120421351414428
Max (HH:MM:SS)09:14:4407:26:2904:20:2403:59:5203:20:4203:45:1404:00:28
Year2016201720182019202020212022 (Partial)
Block Range425375-425381494062-494068514763-514769578632-578638622894-622890688986-688992760246-760252
Max
(seconds)
13922139411497212057150752176013434
Max (HH:MM:SS)03:52:0203:52:2104:09:3203:20:5704:11:1506:02:4003:43:54
Maximum 6-block confirmation time per year

Overall, 75% of transactions awaiting 6 block confirmations would be expected to be confirmed within approximately 1 hour and 10 minutes, with 95% being confirmed within approximately 1 hour and 45 minutes.