A confirmation count
You sent the money and now there is a counter. It moves slowly, the page says nothing useful, and the natural conclusion after twenty minutes is that something has gone wrong. It almost never has.
- What it is
- How many blocks have been built on top of your transaction
- Where you meet it
- The deposit page, after sending
- What it settles
- How hard your payment would be to reverse
- Cannot tell you
- When the credit will appear, exactly
The specimen
confirmations 2 of 10
credited not yet
seen means the network has it. credited means the market accepted it.
the gap between those two lines is the entire wait.
A deposit in progress. The distinction on the last two lines is what most confusion is about. Your money left, the network has it, and the market is waiting before it will treat the balance as real.
What a confirmation is
Each confirmation is one more block built on top of the block holding your transaction. Undoing a payment means rebuilding everything on top of it, so each additional block makes a reversal more expensive by a large factor. Waiting for several is not bureaucracy, it is the market declining to hand you a balance that could still evaporate.
Why yours is slow
| Cause | How to tell | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Fee too low | Transaction visible on the network but not getting into a block | Wait. Some wallets can bump the fee |
| Network busy | Everything is slow, not just yours | Wait |
| Market waiting for more confirmations | Counter is moving, credit has not happened | Wait, and stop refreshing |
| Sent to an expired address | Never appears as seen at all | This is the other specimen, and it is a different problem |
What not to do while waiting
- Do not send it again. The first one is not lost, it is queued.
- Do not go looking for support. That is the state a support message is fishing in.
- Do not close and reopen the account page repeatedly. It changes nothing and can trip rate limiting.
- Do not assume the market is gone because a counter is slow. Those two facts are unrelated.
The number of confirmations is a policy, not a law
Different markets and different coins wait for different counts, and the figure gets changed when conditions change. There is no universal correct number and no reason to be suspicious of a high one. A market that waits longer is being more careful with its own exposure, which is a mild point in its favour rather than an inconvenience aimed at you.
Why the count differs between markets
It is a policy, set against how much the operator is willing to lose if a payment gets reversed, and it moves when network conditions move. There is no universal correct number and a higher one is not a market being awkward with you. It is a market being careful with its own exposure, which is a mild point in its favour even though it costs you a longer wait.