I want to make a trade, I sent btc to my account on an exchange, and it got 1 confirmation but then nothing, so its still pending.
I've been waiting more than an hour. Why does it take so long to confirm payments in the chain?
Most exchanges will require a transaction to have at least 6 confirmations prior to confirming a deposit. This is to allow them to mitigate the risk that the chain that contains the transaction does not get orphaned. It is very similar to waiting for a check to clear but the process takes on average one hour verses days or possibly weeks for checks.