Count confirmations against the current chain and the recipient's policy, not elapsed minutes.
Three different milestones
A wallet can broadcast a transaction before any miner includes it in a block. Inclusion produces its first confirmation; later blocks build on that history. A recipient may then wait for a chosen confirmation count before crediting an account. These are separate events. A green animation in the sending wallet does not establish which event the receiving service has actually observed or accepted.
Read the block numbers
Imagine a payment enters block 900,000 and the current chain tip is 900,002. It has three confirmations: its own block and two successors. The calculation is tip height minus inclusion height plus one, assuming that inclusion block remains on the active chain. Record the transaction identifier, destination, amount and block hash together. A height alone does not uniquely identify a block during competing chain histories.
Why a clock is insufficient
Block production is variable. Waiting a familiar number of minutes is not equivalent to observing a particular number of blocks. Nor does paying a larger fee purchase a guarantee that the next block will contain a transaction. Consider an invoice with an expiry time: payment arrival, confirmation and exchange-rate locking can all follow different contractual rules. Ask the recipient how it treats a payment that arrives before expiry but confirms afterwards.
Build an acceptance checklist
Before treating a payment as settled for your purpose, verify the correct Bitcoin network, intended output and current confirmation count. Then check the recipient's published requirement and whether its own system has credited the payment. A missing credit can be an internal processing issue rather than a blockchain failure. Keep evidence and contact official support instead of automatically sending again. Confirmation thresholds are risk policies, not a universal promise that every payment becomes irreversible at the same count.
Sources & context
Sources checked 7 October 2026. This is explanatory coverage, not personalised investment advice. Our corrections policy.
