Average Bitcoin Spender Doesn’t Need 6 Confirmations

Double-spending an average Bitcoin (BTC) transaction is not profitable and, though exchanges and merchants often require it, sending some sats may not in fact need six confirmations – according to calculations by two mathematicians.

For an average transaction, only one or two confirmations (in theory, it would take c. 20 minutes) are needed to be requested by the recipient so the double spend strategy wouldn’t be profitable, they claim.

A paper by two European mathematicians, Cyril Grunspan and Ricardo Pérez-Marco, published by Cornell University, looks into the calculations and the estimate of the probability of success of a double spend attack as presented in the Bitcoin White Paper. The mathematicians’ goal was to see how many transaction confirmations are needed to incentivize honest mining and how profitable it really is to double-spend a transaction when compared to honest mining.

Double-spending is a risk that a cryptocurrency can be spent…