Topic: All you need to know about Unconfirmed transactions and what to do about them. (Read 4251 times)

Thank you for explaining. The transaction is from 08.12. i use mycelium wallet i delete the cache a view times and when the system forget it is going back to my wallet... but now there is the same transaction with the startdate 21.12. ?

An unconfirmed transaction hangs for 21 days, after such a time you can hope that it will be confirmed?

Thanks Dent_DC


the "program" doesn't forget anything. When you send a transaction, your transaction goes to bitcoin nodes. Each node keeps it a certain amount of time in its memory. This time varies but the default is 2 weeks. After that time, that particular node "forgets" about your transaction but not the whole network.

Is there any chance the programm forget your transaction ?

This:

2) A very important thing to know
Transaction can be reversed until it is confrimed. in other words you do not own the received bitcoins until the transaction has at least 1 confirmation.

Should be confirmed.

This:

3) Ask a miner directly to mine your transaction, this may not be free.
You can use ViaBTC accelerator tool. Read the details on the ViaBTC website.

Dead link, should be https://viabtc.com/tools/txaccelerator/

It's been 5 days for this transaction: 7994738a983be110f6d060f0500fc5b4ed369189a9946e80e65adf05ff40c7e2 and I'm trying to find out what I can do to cancel or resend it with a higher fee.

I'm using Bitcoin Core version v0.14.1 (64-bit)

I've read several posts about RBF and some different methods of replacing the transaction.  Most of them say to Abandon the transaction however this option is grayed out for me?

I read a post that said to close Bitcoin Core, delete mempool.dat, and restart with walletbroadcast=0 but it is still grayed out.

I'm not sure what else to do at this point.  Using one of the accelerator sites would work if I had any more BTC...

Are there any other options?

I really appreciate your help!

Thank you and have a great day.

Added.

If anyone knows of any other similar threads, please feel free to x-post the above quote.

That is a lot of useful information for people that are new to bitcoin, I never knew that we can accelerate the transaction using all these sites.

I think that "better" is a fairly subjective term. I think it is probably fair to say that RBF is a fairly controversial "feature" and that some people may not want to utilize this feature because of these controversies.

I would point out that some companies/services are willing to accept 0/unconfirmed transactions under a certain set of circumstances, and I imagine that one criteria would likely be that the transaction in question is not a RBF transaction (nor does it depend on a RBF transaction that has < a certain number of confirmations). For example, Gemini will accept 0/unconfirmed deposits under an undisclosed set of circumstances (and with certain restrictions -- they also require identity verification prior to allowing users to use their exchange), and I imagine that they will not accept a RBF transaction that is 0/unconfirmed. 

this is off-topic here but take a look at this topic https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/mother-of-all-spam-attacks-on-bitcoin-network-proof-1776143 which can be a possible case of the spammers and you may get the gist of what is going on when it is said "they are spamming"
and there are lots of speculation about who they might be and why they are doing it.

Technically speaking it should be possible, as long as you own the private key to one of the outputs in order to spend it.
But I didn't put it under "Sender" section because as a sender there are better options such as opt-in RBF.

I think it is worth mentioning here that Electrum will have CPFP feature in its new release (2. along with SegWit support.

I believe that you can use CPFP if you are the sender to the extent that your transaction sends change to an address whose private key(s) you control.

Odds are a Zero Fee transaction will be ignored.
(and it will do nothing but lock up the transaction for ~72 hours before it is released back to you.)

https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/death-zero-fee-bitcoin-transaction/

 

that is also a possibility but it is a race, when there are 70,000 transactions which at least (with a big optimistic view) 50,000 one of them have high fees such as 0.0003BTC fees per byte, nobody will mine your zero fee transaction.

From my point of view, not only for completeness of this post but for practical reasons too, given that now often we see 150s/b, you could point that above estimation of fees is based when public keys are uncompressed. But when public keys are compressed (nowadays usually are) then someone have to replace the value 180 with shorter one that is 148.

Spam attacks and double tip situations will just make things worse than what it is right now. And paying more fees to miners will be a short term solution which is not good for the future of Bitcoin.
Thank you, OP for such an informative post.

I have experience this in my wallet that took a lot of hours to confirm. It tooks 24hours to confirm in my wallet. When I check in blockchain.info unconfirmed transactions. Anyway, thanks for these information why and whats reason its unconfirmed transactions.

If I put zero fee, is it possible that my transactions will be confirmed anyway?

So it is safe to assume micro transaction part of the bitcoin concept is dead already? when miners confirm transactions only the block winner receives the fees in addition to the 12.5 bitcoins, with the current drama the most powerful pools are becoming the central authority figures of bitcoin and soon they'll start to dictate their terms and conditions.

A very well-explained thread regarding unconfirmed transactions,thanks to op nice info well use it for future reference.

If you pay a fee to miners on top of the fees that you included in your original tx, then things will quickly escalate into a situation where

"spam" attacks will become more popular. They would run this, just to "double dip" on the fees.  ... We should find a way, to

eliminate and avoid this scenario, rather than promoting methods to "repair" it. That said, your thread is still extremely helpful in the

situation we have now... so thumbs up for that. 

When you broadcast a transaction it propagates through the network in matter of seconds and it stays in the mempool (all the nodes are broadcasting it), now this transaction can not stay there forever otherwise size of the mempool would go up extremely fast to an unmanageable size.
To fix this, nodes will drop transactions that have not been confirmed for a certain amount of time (default in bitcoin core is 72 hours). Not all nodes have this default setting though.

If you are the sender, you can send the same transaction from your wallet (if you are a full node by just opening your wallet and connecting) or you can spend it again.
If you are the receiver, the only thing you can do is to save the transaction hex and push it yourself if it was dropped. do this by adding a ?format=hex tag at the end of blockchain.info/tx/..... links.

so do we have to find/hire a miner to mine that transaction for us so we can retrieve the bitcoin that the nodes have been forgotten or it will dissappear? I just have this thoughts so in the future I know the answer and not be ignorant about it thanks in behalf of who will answer first.

I was mistaken it is 72 hours by default and can be changed.
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Running_Bitcoin (Ctrl+F mempoolexpiry)

Thanks for providing this to the community, very helpful.

I once had a transaction for 1.5 bitcoin take over 6 hours for one confirmation. I sent the average fee so I didn't understand WTF was going on. It confirmed eventually/luckily but this is a great topic for people who are in a similar position to what I was.

Do you have a reference link to that 48 hours and nodes stop broadcasting statement?
I would like to read it.


 

Feel free to leave bitcoin and bitcoin board and continue to use your favorite altcoins, nobody is forcing you to be here and to use bitcoin.

You should have checked your fee/byte versus fee/byte that http://bitcoinfees.21.co/ suggested at the time of your transaction to figure out if it was really a good recommendation or was it far off the mark.
I can't tell now with these two information.

I have never heard such a thing.

Please read the topic carefully before posting. General > #1 and Sender > #1 explains it.
Your transactions are 226 bytes and 666 bytes which requires 31,640 and 93,240 Satoshi. Your transactions have half the suggested fee which means there are lots of other transactions with higher fee and higher priority than yours which miners are going to prefer.
Use General > #3 solution for now to increase the possibility of being included in a block.

After about 48 72 hours transactions may be forgotten which means nodes will stop broadcasting it and it is possible that your transaction disappears.

Can somebody advice me which wallet I should take and which fee to set in future? Currently I use the blockchain.info wallet. I have enough of waiting for 16 hours or more for transactions. I have no problems with paying more fees.

There is nothing to get worried even if the transaction doesn't gets confirmed after 24 hours. Just view the unconfirmed transaction. If you can see your transaction under that nothing to fear else contact the support team.

Hello,

I read some things about unconfimed transactions. Usually it takes 1-2 hours. Last week I had to wait for 6 hours. But this time I am waiting for almost 15 hours and still not confirmed. Horrible.
Can anybody give me an indication how long it will take before it will confirmed? Here are the transation details:

https://blockchain.info/tx/216adde7507773b3916cb13172835b24ba832861ec63992bf6d982edc86a67dc
and
https://blockchain.info/tx/940d6d64a76d40b73b38c1d9379ed30a1b0a8fdac1d0f87c2df180eb24ff5b88

I am also very curious what the best fee will be. I have added some fee, but probably not high enough.
Thanks,

thank you for this info.
I was wondering why the transaction was not shown in my wallet instantly.
now I know it was the low transaction fee which caused the delay.

I do appreciate OP for this but what cause delay even after paying the recommended transaction fee suggested by the wallet provider, this has happened ones or twice before and also I was told that exchanges have gentleman agreement with miners to prioritize their transactions over others.

Best Solution , I have been using

Check the unconfirmed amount of transactions before sending .
https://blockchain.info/unconfirmed-transactions

If the amount of unconfirmed BTC transactions is over 10 thousand,
then I send another coin like LTC or ETH instead of BTC.

If the amount of unconfirmed BTC transactions is under 10 thousand,
then I can send BTC knowing it will arrive in ~ 2 hours or so.


 

Thank you. But where in blockchain.info can I know the sizes of each of my transactions?

Blockchain.info offers limited functionality, it is however sets the fee according to your size automatically for you. This doesn't mean it is doing a good job though. That is why I said think about changing your wallet.

You can however calculate an estimated size if you insist on using BC.I. A rough estimate is this:
ref

The funny thing is RBF existed from very early version and it was added in 0.12.0 and I can not find it in bitcoin core (0.13.0 I should upgrade soon :/) apart from mempool which is about relaying the RBF transactions not making them.

You may want to mention in bold that wallets most of the time has nothing to do with your transactions being unconfirmed for a long time because people usually assume that and make threads on specific wallets boards.

it's "replaceable" the same as abandon transaction in bitcoin core, because there is not such option in core, but maybe they do the same thing?

Read Things to do as sender > #1 (use a tool like http://bitcoinfees.21.co/ to determine the best fees next time) your transaction must have had less than 140 satoshis/byte fee
Read General > #3

Also think about changing your wallet.

What can I do if I'm using a web wallet like blockchain.info? I made a small transaction 2 hours ago. There's not a single confirmation. Is someone spamming the network again?

so what is youre solution, if after over 24 hour bitcoin transaction still unconfirmation
what are you doin can fast confirmation transaction
ussualy iam case problem bitcoin transaction is very long time confirmation

This is all we really need to know about unconfirmed transactions and how to deal with especially now that I'm reading a lot of posts regarding unconfirmed transactions. This is a very helpful post! Some of the details are just fresh to me and I thank you for this!

..and? I didn't go off topic, if this isn't about unconfirmed transactions sorry then.

Not a very logical thinker are you? 

Please READ:

Paying higher fees = band aid for the problem.  

Mr captain obvious over here.  

I am not sure which board to post this in!
Please avoid any off-topic discussions here.
If you found any mistakes (technical or grammatical) please tell me.

Because of the fact that bitcoin blocks can only include a certain number of transactions (to reach the maximum consensus block size) and also the fact that number of transactions (for reasons beyond scope of this topic) has gone up, mempool is growing and more transactions are waiting to be included in a block.
In this topic I'll try to give some guidelines about what to do in order to get faster confirmations and also get rid of stuck transactions.


General things you need to know (as both receiver and sender):
1) A common novice mistake about fee:
Fee is calculated based on "size in bytes" not "size as in amount" which means it doesn't matter if you send 10BTC or 0.01BTC as far as fees are concerned. If you have are spending many outputs and create multiple new outputs the size of your transaction in bytes will be high and you have to pay higher fee.

2) A very important thing to know
Transaction can be reversed until it is confirmed. in other words you do not own the received bitcoins until the transaction has at least 1 confirmation.

• If you run a full node and in normal network status: 3 confirmation is Highly reliable
• If you are running an SPV wallet: 6 confirmation is Highly reliable
• In case of emergencies 30 confirmation is suggested (this is not common) More information here

3) Ask a miner directly to mine your transaction, this may not be free.
You can use ViaBTC accelerator tool. Read the details on the ViaBTC website.
If nothing else worked, you can contact Quickseller (Please include your transaction ID when contacting Quickseller to speed up the process) which does it as a volunteer work. He will then ask you to
- Confirm the transaction is not any kind of double spend, or attempt to harm any entity
- Pay a fee to f2pool payout address
He can then push your transaction to f2pool and the next block that f2pool mines will include your transaction.


Things to do as sender:
1) Pay Appropriate amount of fees!
New versions of most wallets have dynamic fees based on current status of mempool and previous blocks' fees and they suggest an appropriate amount of fee automatically based on your transaction size and an estimate of how fast it will be confirmed. you can also use a tool like http://bitcoinfees.21.co/ to see what an appropriate fee/byte currently is.

2) RBF
Opt-in Replace-by-fee allows you to replace your previous transaction that had lower fees with a new one that has a higher amount of fee. To put simple when you initially send a transaction with Opt-in RBF, you are telling the network that you may resend the same transaction with higher fees.
In the end it depends on the miners who mine the next block and whether or not they support opt-in RBF.
Electrum (v2.7.0+) allows creating RBF transactions.


3) Double Spend.
Double spending is spending the same outputs, and in case your transaction didn't have enough fees and it wasn't and RBF transaction the only other way is to double spend and include higher fees.
The problem with this method is that most nodes will see the double spend and not accept or relay the transaction.
Either wait for the transaction to fall out of the mempool (be forgotten) or if you run a full node such as bitcoin core abandon the transaction and start a new one.


Things to do as receiver:
1) Contact the sender
Ask the sender to do one of the above suggestions to speed up the process. Generally ask them to include higher fees.

2) CPFP:
Child Pays For Parent means the receiver spends an unconfirmed transaction output and includes enough fee covering the first (unconfirmed output) and the new (his own transaction).
This can only be done If your wallets allows spending unconfirmed transactions (it can still be done by creating a transaction manually and then signing it with your wallet)
Not all miners support CPFP
Advanced technical details (BIP125)