Quote from: DannyHamilton on December 12, 2017, 02:38:41 PM

Transactions are broadcast and then are typically received by the payee's wallet within a few seconds.

The process is a peer-to-peer relay of the transaction throughout the network until nearly every participant has received the transaction.

At that point the transaction is described as "unconfirmed". The recipient can then decide if they are willing to rely on the unconfirmed transaction based on any trust-relationship they have with the sender.

Meanwhile, the miners (as participants in the system) will also have received the unconfirmed transaction. Each miner (or mining pool) will prioritize the transaction for themselves based on any criteria they choose (since they are profit motivated they generally choose to prioritize based on fee per byte, or fee per block weight unit). They then choose the highest priority transactions and fill the block that they are working on with those transactions. The first miner (or pool) to complete the proof-of-work will broadcast the block of transactions, and then all miners (and pools) will begin again with their list of unconfirmed transactions.

Once the transaction is included in a completed block, it will be described as "confirmed" with 1 confirmation. At that point it will generally be safe for most recipients to rely on the transaction regardless of the trust-relationship they have with the sender. If it is a high value or high risk transaction, then the recipient may choose to wait for additional blocks to be added to the blockchain on top of the block that includes their transaction. Each additional block added to the chain is considered to be an additional "confirmation" of the transaction.

The amount of time that it takes to get one or more confirmations is variable. With a high enough transaction fee, the transaction will typically be (but is not guaranteed to be) included within the next 3 blocks or so. The amount of time that it takes to complete a block is random, but the long term average is about 10 minutes. Any individual block could be much faster or much slower than that.

Thank you.