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)!
Year | 2009 | 2010 | 2011 | 2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 |
Block Range | 0-6 | 74637-74643 | 149092-149098 | 208508-208514 | 215900-215906 | 297493-297499 | 386679-386685 |
Max (seconds) | 465284 | 26789 | 15624 | 14392 | 12042 | 13514 | 14428 |
Max (HH:MM:SS) | 09:14:44 | 07:26:29 | 04:20:24 | 03:59:52 | 03:20:42 | 03:45:14 | 04:00:28 |
Year | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 (Partial) |
Block Range | 425375-425381 | 494062-494068 | 514763-514769 | 578632-578638 | 622894-622890 | 688986-688992 | 760246-760252 |
Max (seconds) | 13922 | 13941 | 14972 | 12057 | 15075 | 21760 | 13434 |
Max (HH:MM:SS) | 03:52:02 | 03:52:21 | 04:09:32 | 03:20:57 | 04:11:15 | 06:02:40 | 03:43:54 |
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.