Litecoin has faster blocks, but needs more confirms.
I understand this is because of possible reorgs, but how come it also needs 10 minutes for confirms even though the blocks are faster?
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Litecoin has a target interval of 2.5 minutes. I don't understand what you mean by "how come it also needs 10 minutes for confirms"? – Murch♦ Mar 19 '15 at 12:44
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@Murch I mean that you cannot use 6 confirms as with Bitcoin, but need more. – Muis Mar 19 '15 at 15:07
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Please edit your question to make it easier to understand, as it's written now it is not clear what you meant. – Murch♦ Mar 20 '15 at 10:13
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If a block is found super fast, like 1 minute, then you have your first confirmation in 1 minute. The 10 minutes is average of time between block confirmation. In fact, since the network in increasing in speed, we are more or less confirming block at 9 minutes each.
In some case, we are out of luck and a single block can take 30 minutes.
That said, the number of confirmation required to accept a payment is totally as the discretion of the merchant. You can accept with 0 confirmation, 1 or 2. Some go more than that but that should be for very big amount (like 100,000$ +).
Another alt coin can confirmed in 10 sec, that's irrelevant because 10 confirmations in that blockchain is still less secure than a single confirmation from the bitcoin network because finding a block in the bitcoin network is harder than finding 10 block in an alt-coin.
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There is a lot of confusion about this topic. As I explain in Analysis of Hashrate-Based Double Spending, the number of needed confirmations stays more or less the same when you reduce the time between blocks.
How many confirmations to wait for is a matter of taste and often arbitrary. It's possible that because of the lower total computational power dedicated to the Litecoin network, it is assumed an attacker could have a higher percentage of the hashrate, and so more confirmations are recommended. But you should still be safe with 2-3 confirmations, which take 5-7.5 minutes on average.
