In case you do not grasp the essential idea, think about for a second {that a} community outage break up the bitcoin community in half. I might ship one transaction giving 30 bitcoins to Abel to 1 half and one transaction giving those self same 30 bitcoins to Fred to the opposite. Every half would settle for that transaction and till the 2 halves reconnected, you would not know which transaction could be honored tomorrow.
Confirmations are merely blocks which have been generated after the block that incorporates your transaction. As a result of there is no such thing as a central authority that may be consulted to make sure a transaction might be dedicated, recipients use the variety of confirmations as a approach of defending towards double-spend assaults.
The community is at all times making an attempt to increase the longest chain, and finally, some chain will win. The deeper the transaction is within the chain, the upper the possibility it should win as a result of the community tries very onerous to not duplicate efforts. (As a result of miners need their coinbase transactions to win, all of them attempt very onerous to increase the chain most probably to win, which makes certain it does the truth is win.)
Successfully, the extra confirmations, the upper the chance {that a} transaction will stay perpetually within the public hash chain relatively than a conflicting transaction if there was one. At 6 confirmations, it’s maybe one in a billion {that a} transaction will not be everlasting — and that is if the sender is making an attempt a double spend assault.