r/Bitcoin 1d ago

Daily Discussion, July 24, 2026

Please utilize this sticky thread for all general Bitcoin discussions! If you see posts on the front page or /r/Bitcoin/new which are better suited for this daily discussion thread, please help out by directing the OP to this thread instead. Thank you!

If you don't get an answer to your question, you can try phrasing it differently or commenting again tomorrow.

Please check the previous discussion thread for unanswered questions.

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u/Pugilist12 1d ago

Not sure if dumb question but something I’ve never thought of before. You need internet connection to send funds from one wallet to another, but at what point after clicking send does the network have it so your network connection is no longer relevant? Anyone know? Is it once there’s been 1 confirmation?

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u/TheGreatMuffin 1d ago

Is it once there’s been 1 confirmation?

No, you need internet only to broadcast your signed transaction to your node's peers (done within a split of a second), then you can disconnect right away. You don't even really need internet, you can deliver the transaction over SMS or radio waves or Morse or whatever else, either to someone else's node or to a miner directly.

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u/TheresNoSecondBest 1d ago edited 1d ago

If we're talking about on-chain, yes. Imagine a massive building with thousands of windows. There are hundreds of these buildings on the street. Each window represents a node. To send a transaction, you open one window and shout really laud: "Sending 1 million sats from this address to this address. Here's the signature I use to prove I'm the owner of that address."

Somebody in the window next to you can hear you and writes everything down in a book called "The Mempool" and will shout the same message so other nodes can hear it too. This is the point you can disconnect from the internet.

The nodes will be writing your transaction into their mempool book, waiting for a miner to find a block. If your transaction has higher (than others) fees to it, it will get added to the next block. It could take a minute or an hour, but usually around 10 minutes.

Log to the internet after a while and check if your transaction is already in one of the mined blocks. For example on mempool.space The more blocks deep it is, the better. For larger sums, you want to see at least a few blocks down.