Bitcoin network
How the Bitcoin network settles a payment
Bitcoin is the slowest and most expensive network we support, and also the one nobody can reverse, censor or switch off. Whether that trade is worth it depends entirely on what you sell, so here is what actually happens between a customer pressing send and you being able to ship.
What the wait is really made of
A Bitcoin block arrives roughly every ten minutes, and a confirmation is simply your payment being buried under one more block. The first one usually lands within that ten-minute window; each additional one is another ten minutes on average, and “on average” is doing real work in that sentence — block times vary, and a quiet stretch can double it.
You do not wait for all of it before reacting. The payment is reported the moment it appears in the mempool, which is enough to show the customer that it worked and stop them paying twice. The confirmed event is the one to hold physical goods against.
The reason for the wait: an unconfirmed transaction can still be replaced, and a shallowly confirmed one can in principle be undone by a chain reorganisation. Each block makes that exponentially less plausible, which is why the threshold is a number rather than a promise.
What it costs to pay you
The network fee is paid by your customer to Bitcoin miners — never to us, and never out of your amount. It is priced per byte of transaction data rather than as a share of the value, so it costs the same to send you five dollars as five million.
That cuts both ways, and it is the single most useful thing to know about this network: Bitcoin is unbeatable for large payments and often absurd for small ones. When the network is busy a fee can exceed a small invoice outright, and your customer simply will not send it. If your average order is small, take it on a cheaper chain and keep Bitcoin for the large ones.
What this network carries
Bitcoin, and only Bitcoin. There are no stablecoins and no tokens here in the way an EVM chain has them, so an invoice on this network is priced in a currency that moves against yours between the moment you quote it and the moment it settles. That exposure is real and it belongs in your pricing, not in a footnote.
Which customers this network fits
Worth it for
- Large payments, where a flat fee disappears against the amount.
- Customers who hold bitcoin and want to spend it as bitcoin, not convert first.
- Anything where censorship resistance is the point rather than a talking point.
Better suited elsewhere
- Small or frequent payments — the fee is fixed, so it hurts most at the low end.
- Anything needing settlement in under ten minutes.
- Prices that must hold their value; a stablecoin on an EVM chain does that, Bitcoin does not.
What to plan for
- A transaction sent with too low a fee can sit unconfirmed for hours. It is not lost and it is not your problem to fix — the sender can replace it with a higher fee — but the order is not paid until it confirms.
- Once confirmed it cannot be reversed by anyone, including us. That is the protection against chargebacks and the reason a mistaken send is simply gone.
- Bitcoin sent on another network, or another coin sent to a Bitcoin address, does not arrive. The hosted payment page names the network for exactly this reason.
- Fees and confirmation times move with demand for block space, not with anything we control. A quiet week and a busy one are different products from your customer’s point of view.
Questions
How long does a Bitcoin payment actually take?
Seconds to appear, and roughly ten minutes per confirmation after that. You can show your customer a confirmed-looking receipt almost immediately, because the payment is reported when it reaches the mempool. What you should not do is ship physical goods on that signal alone — the confirmed event exists precisely to separate “we can see it” from “it is final”.
How many confirmations do you wait for?
It is a per-network setting rather than a fixed number in this page, and the live value is shown on the supported networks page. More confirmations mean a longer wait and a smaller chance of a reorganisation undoing the payment; the threshold is where that trade is set.
Who pays the network fee, and how much is it?
Your customer pays it, to the network, on top of your amount — you receive what you invoiced. The size depends on how busy Bitcoin is and on the size of the transaction in bytes, not on the value being sent. Nobody can quote it in advance honestly, which is why we do not.
Can I take small payments in Bitcoin?
You can, and often you should not. Because the fee is flat, a five-dollar invoice can carry a fee worth a meaningful fraction of itself when the network is busy, and customers abandon that rather than pay it. A cheaper chain handles small amounts far better; Bitcoin earns its place on the large ones.
Sources
Every figure on this page comes from one of these documents. Each was read on the date shown rather than recalled.
See it settle on testnet
Create an invoice on Bitcoin’s test network, pay it, and watch the detection and the confirmation arrive separately — the same two events you will build against in production.
Start freeAccept Bitcoin · Networks · Non-custodial · Pricing · Answered plainly.