BTW
Itsmylife there is no doubt that this is happening because of low fees. You can see here:
http://bitcoinfees.21.co/This was not a problem before because the Blocks had enough space for low fee txs... but in the past few days the mempool has been saturated with 30k+ txs as you can see here:
https://tradeblock.com/bitcoin/This means that only high fee txs are being confirmed.
In other words... secondstrade has to update their fee policy (maybe use the API at
http://bitcoinfees.21.co/ ?) if they want things to work smoothly in the future. This might cut into their margin... or they might have to make their odds worse... but the alternative is the huge disruption of unconfirmed txs.
Unfortunately I will not be making any new bets until they fix this... I always pay higher-than-recommended fee to make sure that my tx gets into the next block, but I cannot control what fee secondstrade pays. Which means that they always get my money... but I risk not receiving my winnings...
I would much rather have slightly worse odds (by 1-2%) and have proper fees for fast confirmation. It's not that expensive. Right now paying 50 sats/byte (about 15.000 satoshis or 0.00015000 BTC for an average 300byte tx) will guarantee confirmation in the next 1-2 blocks.
(In my unconfirmed tx secondstrade paid 0.0000964 BTC as you can see here
https://blockexplorer.com/tx/9d58bcc0a740f4a462948e29754deea1c8b3b9b8cd730c97b63e38ea3109f7ad...which means that I risk losing an amount of 0.92 BTC or $400 over a stupid $0.03 in fees)
Maybe secondstrade should start using
Ethereum for small-value bets and Bitcoin only for high value bets.