So I had some BTC in an online wallet and decided to send some to BTC-E to trade with. I first sent .07 BTC and unknowingly sent it without a fee. I've read that this could take days and may just get canceled? Will it ever confirm? Anyway, I wanted some coin in there so I sent another transaction of .5 to the same address with a .001 fee thinking it would be confirmed faster. 4 hours later and both still sit in the blockchain with 0 confirmations. What did I do wrong on the second transaction and what can I do, if anything?
If you send a transaction from an address with a low fee, you run the risk of locking up the entire balance on that address until you get confirmations on that first transaction.
This is due to the way Bitcoin transactions work. When you send a BTC amount, what actually happens is the BTC is send to the target and balance remaining is sent to a "change" address. The change address might be your original address, or some new address: it depends on the wallet software. In order for the rest of the coins to become available for spending, the change address transaction also has to have confirmations on the network.
You can check if this is your situation by entering the transaction id of your 2nd transaction in blockchain.info. You will get a black triangle beside the Estimated Confirmation Time that says "This transaction spends an input which is unconfirmed."
