Post
Topic
Board Mining
Re: [BOUNTY] Bitcoin blockchain monitoring site
by
Raulo
on 19/05/2011, 06:54:15 UTC
I think, this could be also useful also estimating - how blocks to wait for considering transaction fixed in block chain.
Ex. if statistics shows, that one block is orphaned with 1% probability, 2 blocks with 0.01%, 3 blocks with 0.0001%, so it does not require to wait 4th block if you are not afraid of <0.0001% probability.

No, it won't. Currently orphaned blocks are accidental due to (almost) simultaneous finding a new block by two miners. Waiting for confirmations is to make sure there are no intentional chain splits. Intentional chain splits are possible with small probability even for an attacker that have <50% of hashspeed. And you won't know it until it's tried. If you have 10% of hashspeed, you will get  two blocks in a row with 1% probability. So you can reverse 1-confirmation transactions once in 100 blocks if you try. Current orphanage rate shown that nobody tried it yet but does not tell you how probable is that someone will try it.