Usually you'll have the first confirmation within 10-15 minutes, which means the money will be available to the receiver to some extent. After 60-80 minutes, the transaction should be complete.

You should be able to see that the transfer has been initiated immediately, from either the buyer or seller perspective. It will still be "unconfirmed" though. Unless you have reason to believe that the sender is a computer whiz trying to con you, that stage is good enough. The transfer will be "confirmed" within 1-3 hours. At that point, nothing in the world could undo it.

Make sure that both your client show the full block chain. The number of blocks the client shows in the bottom right of the window must be 135063 or greater. If that isn't the case you have to wait for the client to finish catch up to date. (this could take a while)

Well for purposes of trading a transfer is done when the recipient sees the bitcoins in their balance, I thought that was obvious.


Thanks alot for that tip, it will speed up my future trades ALOT !


P.S.
I just waited two damn minutes for the reply window to open !  This forum is damn sluggish today ! And time is money !

It wasn't a dumb reply, it was usefull, but I replied only to the part I needed to reply. Partial quoting is common on all forums.


It's not just me, my Internet connection is much faster then needed for his forum, my processor is fast enough, most other sites out there work perfectly fine, and this one usually works faster. But today sometimes it responds almost instantly and sometimes I wait for half a minute.

Aren't you aware than there are more hops between you and the Bitcoin forum and they might have problems as well?.

NP, that's what I'm here for.