Bitcoin transactions and confirmations
Bitcoin transactions are incorporated into the bitcoin blockchain, that acts as a shared ledger. Once the transaction has been part of the blockchain for a long enough period of time, it is accepted as truth by all the nodes in the network and becomes an unalterable part of the bitcoin permanent record. This makes it irreversible and resistant to both network events and deliberate tampering in the form of double-spending attacks.
A block that is added to the blockchain that contains the transaction is called a confirmation. So a newly broadcast transaction is said to have zero confirmations. When it's included in a block, it has one confirmation. Another block is mined on top of the block containing the transaction, we have two confirmations. Generally, a transaction is not considered definitive unless it has six confirmations. On average this takes about an hour.
In this post we will develop a crude system for handling zero-confirmation transactions without incurring into any appreciable risk.
