Topic: Electrum Wallet "Low Fee" (Read 6398 times)

Electrum doesn't broadcast transactions. It is electrum servers that do it. A solution has been presented to you in another thread. Do a CPFP tx and then get a refund from the person you sent the money to. Otherwise just wait it out.

Could someone look at this transaction and tell me what is going on?  I sent it over a week ago (may 16th) and it has not been confirmed. I understand the fee might have been too low given all the recent btc transactions.  I would have thought it would drop out of the mempool and returned to my wallet.

Looking on blockchain a few days ago it was no longer found but still found on blocktrail.  Now it is back on blockchain, which seems to have been rebroadcast somewhere

Tx id: 9ce1baa28ae0911503b6b87a46ccc334c4d7868a0edfc4dc464bf3f0e331a5e3
wallet: electrum

1) Does electrum rebroadcast automatically?  If I keep electrum closed does that stop any rebroadcasts?

2) Does sending a new transaction with electrum rebroadcast all the unconfirmed transactions?  That would explain why this reappeared on blockchain.

3) I would rather not increase the fee since I emptied my wallet and would now need to load it again to try and increase the fee. 

4) viabtc seems to be swamped since I have had no success getting this site to accept the above transaction.  Getting try again later message

Thanks HI-TEC99, I've done that and all is clear now. Thank you for your help. Wishing you a great day.

It's because electrum displays balances in milli-Bitcoins by default. Use the instructions in the quote to both enable dynamic fees, and make electrum display balances in Bitcoins (BTC). If you enable dynamic fees electrum will automatically calculate the best fees to pay.

Thank you HI-TEC99 for doing that for me, very kind. Thanks to everyone for your input on this thread. My wallet now shows the confirmed transaction with a green tick

I have another question, in my wallet I have to amounts;

+ 1515.439
+ 0.5

How many Bitcoins is that?

I assume 0.5 is half a coin. But what is 1515.439, is that 1.51 coins?
This would make sense because it's about what I expected (2 coins total) but I want to learn how the decimal placements work, it makes no sense to have 4 digits before the decimal in the first amount?

There's no need to pay for a "Child Pays For Parent" now. I successfully submitted the transaction in the quote to the viabtc accelerator. It will confirm when viabtc mines its next block if no other pool confirms it before then.


There's a list of viabtc's most recent blocks and the times they were mined at here. It gives an overview of how long you might have to wait.

https://blockchain.info/blocks/ViaBTC

edit

It's now been confirmed by ViaBTC, it has 9 confirmations

Thanks guys. Do you know how much roughly I would need to pay for a "Child Pays For Parent" transaction? If it's £5 or £10 I might do that because I'm tired of all this messing around with Bitcoin unfortunately.

If you go ViaBTC TX Accelerator route, at the top of the hour, every hour, 100 free lots open up. My suggestion for you is this. Enter your TX ID and the captcha ahead of time. As soon as your phone or computer time hits the hour, press enter. It took me a few tries yesterday, but i got it at 5PM last night. My 36sat/B transaction last night was approved within 2 hours.

the fact that you see ~3BTC worth of inputs while you only withdrew 1.5 BTC is normal, it's basically how bitcoin works. The company paying you used a bunch of unspent outputs they controlled as input for a new transaction. This (new, unconfirmed) transaction has 2 outputs: one output to you, one output to either their change address, or to somebody else that needed to get payed.
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Thanks mocacinno, that makes sense.

Unfortunately, it also has a low fee of only ~92 sats/byte

You'll need to try and use the ViaBTC TX Accelerator or maybe try a "Child Pays For Parent" transaction to get it confirmed.

But at least the mystery is solved

the fact that you see ~3BTC worth of inputs while you only withdrew 1.5 BTC is normal, it's basically how bitcoin works. The company paying you used a bunch of unspent outputs they controlled as input for a new transaction. This (new, unconfirmed) transaction has 2 outputs: one output to you, one output to either their change address, or to somebody else that needed to get payed.

HCP, I checked the ID and it is different?!

So strange, I even asked the company that I bought the Bitcoins from to tell me the ID which was the one I posted earlier. Anyway, I right clicked and "details" shows the ID as: 18da4880116c8f13a834f452a97f85d3fc5b4ab78ac22d7a917ad4d3ef9af970

Note: I see that the transaction on blockchain.info is for more than $7,000 but I only transferred 1.5 Bitcoins?

You really shouldn't need to do a CPFP transaction, as your transaction has already confirmed. Honestly not sure why Electrum is still saying "low fee". Can you right click the transaction, select "details" and just confirm the transaction ID.

Electrum is generally pretty solid, so for it to still say low fee, I'm wondering if it is a different transaction that is "low fee" and now stuck.

Your earlier transaction was: 8ef53c0af0d9e4994f4ca744ab7241acc5b7ead4eaad5e453036d1ef9b40dbcd

please confirm this ID is the same as the one that still says "low fee"

Thank you HPC for your clear and detailed reply. I can confirm that the green light is showing so I may have to restore my wallet as you advise. Before I do that, I have an option to click on "Child pays for parent". Would you recommend I do this first? I think I am just nervous of clicking anything in case the Bitcoins disappear, ha, I know that's silly but it's all new.

I read that 2 days ago and didn't understand it. I'm not a techy and there's too many abbreviations, hence my comment that plain English should be used. Thanks for the link though.

thanks for your response, i am already aware of the first part of your answer.

I am asking regarding the difference in time of confirmation between the 5 fee options that electrum offers me because i thought electrum automatically calculates the right fee depending the inputs/outputs of the address sending the coins.

EDIT
Ok now i saw the last paragraph of your answer, so the answer is that electrum does not calculate the exact right fees but rather gives an estimation. Is that correct?

And better go with the maximum fee option, just to be on the safe side.

First, let me start off by telling you that the fee isn't based on the monetary value of the btc that is being sent. The network does not care if you're sending 1000 BTC to a drugdealer, or if you sent 0.00001 BTC to a charity. If both transactions use the same amount of inputs and create the same amount of outputs (amounts, not values), they should have the same fee. The fee is not a percent of the amount of BTC transferred, it's an incentive for the miners to include your transaction into the block they're currently working on.
Since the size of a block is limited to 1Mb, it's normal the miners want to optimize their income by picking the transactions with the biggest fee per byte of transaction data.

At this moment, the size of the unconfirmed transactions that is kept in blockchain.info's nodes mempool is +100 Mb. Blockchain.info is just one (or a couple of) node(s), so there are probably much more unconfirmed transactions floating around on the network. But if you're saying blockchain.info's mempool is an average mempool, there are sufficient unconfirmed transactions floating around in the mempools to fill 100 blocks... So, if nobody would create a new transaction for the next 4 days, and the miners kept creating completely full blocks the whole time, there would still be unconfirmed transactions left after the 4 days have passed...

So, yes, there is a big difference in paying 0.0015 or 0.003. The fee you pay per byte is double when paying 0.003, so you'll have a bigger chance of ending up with a confirmed transaction. If you look at the threads in the technical support subforum, you'll notice dozens of threads opened by users that payed insufficient fees, and now have to bribe miners to add their transactions, try to double spend, RBF, CPFP,... Save yourself the headache and don't cheap out on the fees!

If you want a "second opinion" to see if electrum picked an appropriate fee, you can count the number of inputs used for the transaction you're generating, and count the number of outputs, then punch in these numbers in option 2 of my fee estimator: https://www.mocacinno.com/page/feeestimate

I have a question regarding electrum & fees, since this is the first time i am using this wallet.

While playing with the fees slider, i get 5 different fees for "within 25 blocks",  starting from 0.0015 up to 0.0027 and of course there is a final option for 0.003 for "within 2 blocks"

Which one should i choose?
Does it really make any difference if i choose 0.0015 or 0.0027 fees? All are for "within 25 blocks"

Let's say that the amount i want to send is 0.0245 in total, so i guess 0.003 for "within 2 blocks" is a little too much

the forum is chock full of threads about unconfirmed transactions. Can you people at least try to search for a solution first? it's very simple. Just use cpfp:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/5zchm8/sent_transaction_with_low_fees_in_electrum_can_i/dex2alq/

Firstly, what you need to realise is that is isn't the wallet software "halting your coins"... it is the bitcoin network. A lot of new users are quick to blame the wallet software for any issues. In most cases it isn't the software that is lacking, it is the users knowledge of Bitcoin and how it all works. Granted, it can be quite daunting and complex, and there is a lot to learn but in the immortal words of Kenny Rogers - "If you're gonna play the game, boy. You gotta learn to play it right"

Now, Back to your issue... "Low fee" is basically just a warning from Electrum that the transaction has a "Low Fee" and as such, may take a while to confirm. There is another warning that you might see that says "unconfirmed parent" which means that one of the parent transactions for the transaction in question is still unconfirmed, as such, this transaction cannot confirm until the parent transaction does.

If your transaction has confirmed (which it has) but Electrum is still showing it as "low fee" and not a "green tick", it sounds like it isn't updating properly. Do you have a "green light" in the bottom right corner?



If not, and you have a "red light" then your Electrum isn't connected to the network and will not be updating the transactions properly. If you have the "blue arrows" it is still syncing the transaction information.

Click the green/red/blue symbol and you should see something like this:



If the block number is less than 467903, then your transaction won't be updated, because Electrum hasn't sync'd up to the point where your transaction was confirmed.
If the "Getting block headers" part doesn't list at least 1 node, then your Electrum isn't updating properly.

If all of that looks ok, then you may need to restore your wallet with your 12 word seed to get it to sync up properly.