Miners are motivated by profits and transactions that pay more than other transactions are preferred when mining a new block.
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This post attempts to explain how the mempool works, how to optimize fees and that one does not need to worry about their funds. In bitcoin there is no "in transit". Transactions are atomic meaning they either happen all at once or don't happen at all. There is no situation where they "leave" one wallet and are not simultaneously and instantaneously in the destination address. Either the transaction happened or it didn't. The only time you can't see the funds is if your wallet is hiding them because it is tracking a pending transaction and doesn't want you to try and spend funds that are already being spent in another transaction.
It doesn't mean the money is in limbo, it's just your wallet waiting to see the outcome. If that is the case, you just wait. Eventually the transaction will either happen or will be deleted by the network. Keep also in mind that this is not possible with any transaction RBF requires opt in before sending, f. If nothing else works and your transaction really needs a soon confirmation, you can try and contact a mining pool to ask them if they would include your transaction. Some mining pools even offer a web-interface for this: 1 , 2.
If you are interested in trying out those options, here is a very helpful post that goes more into it: What can I do to make my stuck transaction confirm? Here you see how many transactions are currently and were historically waiting to be confirmed, i. You can then deduct which layer your own transaction is currently at, and how far away from the top your position is miners work through the mempool always from the top, simply because the transactions on top pay them more.
You can estimate that each newly mined block removes 1MB from the top see the third graph which shows the mempool size in MB. On average, a new block is produced every ten minutes. The second important observation is that the mempool "ebbs and flows", so even the lower paid transactions are periodically being confirmed at some point. A you can influence directly, B you can observe in real time, but C is difficult to predict.
So it's always a little tricky to tell when the first confirmation happens if you set your fees low. But it's quite certain that at some point even the cheap transactions will come through.
Where is my Bitcoin?
Good to know : "fee" means the absolute amount of satoshis a transaction pays, and "fee rate" is the fee per weight of a transaction. Miners prioritize by the latter, because even if a "lighter" transaction pays less in absolute satoshis, it might be more profitable to include it into a block if it has higher fee rate, because it also takes up less space. Transactions are being broadcast by the full nodes on the network.
Each node can adjust their settings for how long they keep unconfirmed transactions in their mempool. This means that in the absolute worst case the unconfirmed transaction will simply disappear from the network, as if it never happened. Keep in mind that in those two weeks the coins never actually leave your wallet.
A transaction with very low fee rate might also disappear from the network if the mempool goes over MB in size, because by default a Bitcoin Core node will purge transactions from its internal mempool, starting with the lowest fee rates first, while increasing its minimum acceptable fee rates that it will broadcast further. You can read more about it here. Spikes this large have been very rare in bitcoin's history so far though, I think there was only one, briefly in January Important to know : even if the transaction has been forgotten by most nodes and doesn't appear anymore on blockexplorers, it is still a valid transaction and might have stayed in the mempool of a node somewhere.
So it's better to use one of the inputs in another transaction to invalidate the original, "stuck" transaction otherwise you risk it to be re-broadcast and be confirmed when you already forgot about it. Here are some resources that can help you estimate fees when sending a bitcoin transaction, so you don't end up overpaying or underpaying unnecessarily. Keep in mind that in order to take advantage of this, you need a proper bitcoin wallet which allows for custom fee setting.
A selection of such wallets you can find here or here. Here you can see a visualization of how many unconfirmed transactions are currently on the network, as well as how many were there in the past. Each coloured layer represents a different fee amount. The most interesting graph is the third one, which shows you the size of the current mempool in MB and the amount of transactions with different fee levels, which would compete with your transaction if you were to send it right now. But this also should help you to see that even the low fee transactions get confirmed very regularly, especially on weekends and in the night periods, and that the spikes in the mempool so far have always been temporary.
For that you can switch to higher timeframes in the upper right corner, f. Try higher timerframes as well. You clearly can see that the mempool is cyclical and you can set a very low fee if you are not in hurry. This is also an overview of the current mempool status, although less visual than the previous one. It shows you some important stats, like the mempool size, some basic stats of the recent blocks tx fees, size etc. You can see this projection in the left upper corner the blocks coloured in brown.
This is a simple estimation tool. It is very simple to use, but the disadvantage is that it shows you estimates only for the next 24 hours. You probably will overpay by this method if your transaction is less time sensitive than that. This is a very simple bot that tweets out fees projections every hour or so. Very simple to use. Hopefully one of these tools will help you save fees for your next bitcoin transaction. Or at least help you understand that even with a very low fee setting your transaction will be confirmed sooner or later.
Waiting for the network to "forget" about the transaction
Furthermore, I hope it makes you understand how important it is to use a wallet that allows you to set your own fees. There is currently a backlog of unconfirmed Bitcoin transactions and typically only the transactions with the highest fees will be confirmed until the backlog clears. Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group.
Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. Why is my transaction not getting confirmed and what can I do about it? Ask Question. Asked 7 years, 11 months ago. Active 2 days ago. Viewed k times.
I sent a transaction without or with an exceptionally small transaction fee using extremely small or unconfirmed inputs while the stars were not standing right. For whatever reason, I have been waiting forever for my transaction to confirm.
Why hasn't my transaction confirmed yet?
Improve this question. Avram Avram 1, 2 2 gold badges 10 10 silver badges 10 10 bronze badges. Avram: Hey, I generalized your question further to use it as a canonical question to catch a wide range of the "unconfirmed" questions we are getting lately. It would be nice for this question to have answers that address other software besides Bitcoin Core NateEldredge: Perhaps we should ask questions on how to do this with specific other wallets and then merge them into this one?
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Why is my cryptocurrency transaction pending? – Uphold Help Center
How Bitcoin Mining Works Bitcoin transactions are mined processed by Miners, and Miners want to benefit from their work. If you have sent a transaction without or with an exceptionally small transaction fee expect it to be ignored for an unknown amount of time until a miner decides to process it and solves the block; this could be several days to several weeks, possibly never. The next best thing is to cancel and resend the transaction.
Make a note of the individual bitcoin address es that the unconfirmed transaction was sent from. Run Bitcoin Core with the -zapwallettxes option or wait a few days until your wallet stops broadcasting the transaction and it falls out of the global transaction mempool. Issue with mempool. Send all your bitcoins from the addresses recorded in step 1 to a new address with the recommended or higher than recommended fee.
Make original transaction again using the recommended fee. What to watch out for Sites that claim to "speed up your unconfirmed bitcoin transaction". From personal experience, these sites are either scams or just don't work. If the addresses used in the original transaction have sufficient bitcoin in them to cover the transaction, it can always be completed at a later date. To avoid this, follow step 3 to empty the associated addresses and do not reuse them. What is the recommended fee? Improve this answer.
Ron Ron 1, 1 1 gold badge 7 7 silver badges 12 12 bronze badges. Very good! Thank you. As of core 0. So you may consider deleting mempool. AntonKrouglov: That sounds like a bug. Please file an issue on github. Update: There is an issue already: github.