Confirmation

A confirmation is the inclusion of a bitcoin transaction in a mined block, plus one more confirmation for each subsequent block built on top. One confirmation means the transaction is in the latest block; six confirmations, roughly one hour at bitcoin's average 10-minute block interval, is the conventional threshold for treating large payments as settled.

Why it matters

Bitcoin's finality is probabilistic rather than absolute: a transaction could in principle be undone if an attacker rebuilt the chain from before its block, but the cost of doing so grows exponentially with each confirmation. Six became the customary standard because reversing six blocks requires out-mining the entire honest network for about an hour, an attack whose expense exceeds almost any plausible payoff. Exchanges calibrate deposit requirements to this math, asking fewer confirmations for small amounts and more for large ones.

In the gold vs bitcoin debate

Gold settles instantly when handed across a table, but institutional gold does not move that way: allocated transfers, vault audits, and international shipments take days and depend on custodians and insurers. Bitcoin offers the reverse profile, roughly an hour to global, final, intermediary-free settlement of any amount, to anyone, at any time. For cross-border value transfer at scale, confirmations are the clock by which bitcoin's settlement advantage over physical metal is measured.