<div dir="ltr"><br><div class="gmail_extra"><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
Alternatively I think instead of displaying a meaningless number we ought<br>
to go by a percentage (the double spend improbability) and go by<br>
'confidence'.</blockquote></div><br></div><div class="gmail_extra">That is a great idea, and not too hard to implement. A bit of code can determine over the last N blocks, how many blocks that were at the current depth of the present transaction were orphaned and divide that by the total number of blocks solved (orphaned or not) while those N blocks were solved. That's the historical number (H), and then the "51% attack" number (A) can make an explicit assumptions like "Assuming a bad actor has 51% of the hashing power for 24 hours starting right now, the block holding this transaction has an X% chance of being orphaned." Report "# confirmations" as "99.44% confidence" using [100% - max(H,A)].<br></div></div>