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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?
Why doesn't the block time influence time the amount of time needed for a transaction to be confirmed?
Answers
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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.
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 – 2015-03-19T12:44:06.693
@Murch I mean that you cannot use 6 confirms as with Bitcoin, but need more. – Muis – 2015-03-19T15:07:19.910
Please edit your question to make it easier to understand, as it's written now it is not clear what you meant. – Murch – 2015-03-20T10:13:42.393