Topic: How to guess or estimate the tx time ? (Read 339 times)

With a fee rate at tip of mempools, we will have to wait for about 10 minutes to get a first confirmation. It is an average waiting time but sometimes will be sooner, even few seconds, and sometimes will be more than 10 minutes. Some blocks need much longer time than 10 minutes to be found and even with a fee rate at tip of mempools, we still have to wait more than 10 minutes.

Only possible with non custodial wallets.

With custodial wallets, we rely on the custodian to broadcast our transaction and its fee rate. Non-custodial wallets are good but better if we choose open-source non custodial wallets.

If you decide to pay over fees and your transaction includes the next transaction, then on average, it should take 10 minutes to confirm your transaction. We all know the average transaction time for the next block is ten minutes. So, though you can get an estimate of transaction fees, transaction duration depends on how congested the network is and how much fee you choose. Many wallets give you the ability to customise transaction fees, and you have to choose the fees accordingly. 

I am going to give you an answer as a user.

1st, it can take as long as your priority to respond to this post:
OP1: ah, I understand (hight priority)
OP2: but, since the response interests you little, that is, it's already March 2, its priority is low.

So, the important thing when making a bitcoin "send" is that the priority shown in the mempool is basically a projection of what you should pay at most, high priority, and at low priority to have an estimated time for it to be  confirm your transaction.

It's that simple, it is an "estimated" time, if the high priority mentions "approximately" 10 minutes, the time can even be less than 10 minutes, or more than 10 minutes, why? It depends on various factors.
Anyway, This is why some use RBF, because the mempool conditions can change in seconds, and the priority price changes, so you check and increment to the new estimated sat/vB value.

Please, don't put in more money than you should, let's say that if a transaction is 35sat/vB, some use 70sat/vB,ok, if the priority is going to change and your transaction is going to be prioritized, but you're giving more money than you should.

In fact, from my user experience it is very possible that the mempool changes to 100sat/VB and your transaction does not have a high priority.

Low priority, it works the same, do not use rates without priority unless you are sending small amounts and the 3%-5% ratio is within the limits, for example send $10 and pay a fee of $1, that is, cheap,(!), but not for that amount since it represents 10%.

There are people who want to send $50 and obviously they don't want to pay a hight priority fee.

In conclusion, the time they show is a reference, it is also good to know that some wallets tell you how many blocks your transaction is waiting to be processed.

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^{S:https://mempool.space/}

You can see the estimated time on each blocks on the mempool. As you can see on the images provided by other forum members, the estimated time is 10 minutes (there's a reason why it is 10 minutes because the average time a block will get confirmed is 10 minutes. So the next block estimated time would be 20 minutes, next would be 30 minutes and so on. The priority is what will help you know the placement of your transaction in a block where it might be in between the second block or third block, in between the first block and second block or it is in the first block ( which as you can see that it is Low-Medium-High priority).

The expected time for confirmation is actually a false thing, let's say if you made 10sat/vb TX when the required fee is 30sat/vb and that too standing in long queue at the same time more transactions are incoming at higher fee then your TX may never get confirmed unless the incoming tx number reduces and existing clogs starts to clear.

Here is an estimate of how much btc a bitcoin transaction could cost at the time you took the screenshot. If you transfer Bitcoin at that time, your transaction may be free if you transfer at the lowest sat/vB and $3 to $3 if you attempt to complete the transaction at medium sat/vB. A little more than that and the third step might cost you a little more BTC. You can wait for 10sat/vB if you are not very urgent to transfer bitcoin right now. It may take you a long time to reach 10sat/vB or it may take less time it totally depends on Mempool fluctuation. You can wait if you want to transact with relatively low transaction fees.

It's great that the op is using mempool rather than random fee estimating websites to figure out the fees and transaction time. If you point at priorities, it tells you that high is in the first block (the next block), medium is within the next two blocks, low is between the second and the third, and no priority is kind of a wild card.
The average block time is 10 minutes, so high means that it's likely to be confirmed within the next 10 minutes, medium is for 10–20 minutes, low is for 20–30 minutes. At least, that's the way I understand it, although of course there's no guarantee.

In my opinion, finding the right time is a bit complicated because miners can make estimates that are not always accurate, but that's a good question and of course what you have to pay attention to are general factors such as fluctuations in mempool density before making transaction times. It's just that if you want it quickly, just follow the fee amount requested by your broker, but if you want a simple price, just set it manually (if you need low priority), but the effect is that the transaction confirmation time will take a long time, maybe up to a week or at most 4 days after you do it.

That's mempool.space mate.

That's blockchair.com

@OP, given the point about mempool.space I think that's one of the most used website for checking the fees and transaction speed. It gives the idea on how long one transaction will take if you pay for the amount depending per bracket of no, low, medium and high priority. Honestly, the fees are still quite high with $1-$2 because before it was lesser than that and it's not that much but I wouldn't complain anymore as when the spam of ordinals made it cost more than $10 to $20 and more for every transaction.

bitcoinfees.net does not seem accurate compared to the tools above, which measure data based on real time, as the fees mentioned above are different from the data in other services, and the site is updated every 60 seconds by updating the entire page.

As explained above, this depends on many variables, and we can only estimate probabilistically. If you send a very high fee, it will most likely be confirmed in the next block, and we know that on average that will happen in 10 minutes. But I have sent a transaction with the highest fee to be confirmed quickly, the next block took 1 hour to be confirmed, my transaction got stuck in the mempool, and in the end I had to do rbf so that it could be confirmed. I have also sent a transaction at a medium rate because I was not in a hurry for it to be confirmed, and after 20 minutes I look at it and it has already been confirmed because 5 or 6 blocks have been mined in that time interval. One thing is the estimate you make and another what happens after you send the transaction, such as if there is a huge dump of transactions or if the next block (or blocks) takes a long or short time to be confirmed.

Don't just focus on transaction fees, look more broadly at the mempool, specifically above transaction fees you can find the estimated time your transaction will be finalized.



For example, if you make a bitcoin transaction with 12 sat/vB fee, this means your transaction will take 30 - 70 minutes to finalize. So what will happen if your transaction has a lower fee? it will take your transaction longer to finalize, 1 day, 1 month or it could take 1 year. If this has happened and you want to speed up your transactions, you can use RBF or CPFP method, i don't know what the mechanism is and i have never used it, you can look for it yourself or ask users who know more on the forum.

Don’t use the no priority price. Those are so low that it might take forever to confirm. Just look at a few previous blocks and a few blocks coming up and use that fee in there. Maybe at 1-2 sat/vbyte to come up first in line.

Sure this can change and might take longer to confirm but it’s pretty accurate. Just remember to enable RPF and you can always increase the fee. Also keep in mind the 10 mins is an average time for blocks, it can be as low as a few seconds or as high as an hour.

If I get your questions correctly, then this could be the answer that you were looking for.

It depends on how many pending transactions are waiting on the mempool and how many new transactions are coming with how much fees. Let's say you have paid 10 sat/vB fees which has low priority and the current fee is around 30 sat/vB. Now, you have to see how many transactions are waiting to be confirmed that paid more than 10 sat/vB. The average block time is around 10 minutes.

If there are more than 100K transactions, it will take a long time to get confirmed if new transactions keep adding to the mempool with higher fees. So, you cannot guess the estimated time. It is better to use RBF so you can bump your transaction fees when needed.

Because mempools can change quickly, Bitcoin users must use opt-in Replace By Fee RBF for their transactions. If they don't use RBF for initial transaction, they will have to use Child Pay For Parents CPFP later, and it is less convenient than RBF and more expensive than RBF in total transaction fee.

Not all mempools accept full-RBF as it is an alternative for RBF.

Replace by Fee.

You can check that on mempool.space (not memepool, by the way) itself, but remember that it's just a rough estimate. Transaction fees themselves are volatile. One minute a high priority transaction only has to pay 15 sat/vB, the next minute it has to pay 35 sat/vB. It is possible that your 10 sat/vB transaction could be lower priority at the moment only to be dropped later on.

Depending on your wallet, the estimated time of confirmation for your transaction is also shown according to how much you pay for the transaction fees. But, again, these estimates aren't accurate.

That is assuming the mempool size doesn't grow at all, hence no new transactions. That is not a realistic assumption and it's likely going to take several days instead.

By the 2 MB you are referring to, you probably mean the average size, not the average weight. Also note that, you don't need to know the average size for fee estimations or confirmation time.

What you should take into account when estimating confirmation time is the maximum virtual size of blocks.
Each block can contain up to 1 vMB (or 4 million weight units) of transactions.

To make it easy on you and have the higher possibility of getting your transaction confirmed on time, try to check through the mempool and use the highest priority, this means you're more likely to get your transaction confirmed within the next block confirmation, when you pay a lower transaction fee under the low priority, then the transaction ID on the search engine will indicate the estimation on time left for the confirmation of your transaction.

To estimate how long it will take for your transaction to get block confirmation, you can look at the data here https://bitcoinfees.net/ and find out the average number of transactions in a block. At https://bitcoinfees.net/, each fee rates range displays how many transactions were made, and if you know the average number of transactions in a block, then you can estimate in which blocks your transactions will receive confirmation, based on the fee rate you choose. It won't be completely accurate, but at least you'll get a close estimate of the time.