Bitcoin Forum

Is there a reason behind this phenomenon? I've paid generous txn fees at times but it is taking longer than usual to get 1 confirmation and this mostly happen on weekends or friday evenings. Is this a common occurrence?

Yes, bitcoin usage is higher on weekends than it is on week days. Not by much though. Want to share a TX ID?

nothing exceptional happening.. but

seems slushpool went low-data with only 434 transactions which confirmed in 3 minutes.. blockheight 389126

then block height 389127 took 45 minutes to confirm, with a massive 3328 tx's.

im guessing you just had yours confirmed in that 389127 block

This is strange. I have not observed this before.
Most of my transactions get confirmed about the same speed on weekends cf weekdays, except when during times when there was so-called "stress test".

I find since using electrum wallet that it confirms quicker for me but who knows might be just in my head lol

Yes because during Friday evening and weekends the transaction of Bitcoin is too much hence it take more time for one transaction during weekend and Friday .

at least you can get it to work, while with bank account, you're stuck to wait for monday, when they keep saying that everything is automatized, fucking bullshit, they are actually playing with your money on the weekend, by investing them...

at best with bitcoin i had some minor delay, more than acceptable for me

i dont think so, even I think the speed of transactions affected by the origin of the transaction itself, I think the difference lies in the number of transactions conducted on Saturday and Sunday, it is possible that day so many people who make transactions, and this affects the speed transaction.

I didn't notice anything different. It's still better of a time to wait rather than waiting on a bank. If you make a transaction in my country on Friday after office hours, you would have to wait until Monday for that money to go through.

I never have to wait long for my transactions to confirm in the weekends. If I add a fee of 0.0001 it will mostly confirm within the first comming block. The delay in your transaction could be due to you combining a lot smaller "low priority" transactions into one larger transaction. Then it might take a few blocks to confirm, if not longer.

I see. In my country where banking services are rather efficient and transactions are almost instant and e-banking services available 24/7, Bitcoin transactions can feel relatively slow for me at times, especially weekends.


Then I believe slow confirmation during network congestion is one of the weakness of Bitcoins and that is why it is this is one of the reasons it is not widely accepted by the masses?

Some reasons might include some miners' ability of mining, maybe few could not afford to run it all time and could close their miners which might be the case the transactions ain't confirming...

Even, the blockchain ain't working fine these days, some hacks took place and the speed of the transactions had also been lower in getting confirmed...

Bitcoin transactions propagate through the network in a matter of seconds at the most. Confirmations are just assurance that your Bitcoin is very hard to reverse. With banking systems, it can be reversible for up to months.
No. Most services do not actually require confirmations due to the difficulty of executing double spends with 0 confirmations when precautions are taken.
No and No. Difficulty (https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty) is rising rapidly with the blocks being much faster. Big farms do not turn off their equipments with a rising price. Small miners do not significantly affect the confirmation time.

Blockchain has been working fine all along. There has been no reports of hacks and none of the hacks that have happened slowed downthe confirmation speeds.

Varience is affecting the consistency of block intervals. Geez.

The last six blocks were mined within 38 minutes, so the OP is partly wrong about transactions taking a long time to confirm on weekends. He was probably waiting a long time for his own transactions to confirm, then stopped watching confirmation times after his transactions were confirmed. Block times are always random, sometimes they are fast, and sometimes they are slow.

Confirmation time during network congestion is slowed down due to the limited blockspace. This is not one of the weaknesses of Bitcoin since it was always intended and planed that this limit would be increased. Bitcoin was never meant to operate near its transactional capacity for extended periods of time. Jeff Garzik just recently wrote an article on why we should increase the blocksize. I believe this is a test of the governance mechanism within Bitcoin, this process might take more time, however I do believe that this is a necessary part of the evolution and growth of the Bitcoin protocol as a whole.

http://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2015-December/011973.html (http://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2015-December/011973.html)

If the difficulty climbs to astronomical levels, will our transactions get stuck in unconfirmed forever since it will take a long time for blocks to be found?

No. For difficulty to rise, the average time of a block getting solved must be less than 10 minute. If the average time is currently 9minutes, it will rise to keep it at 10 minute. Hence, blocks will continue to get solved at an average of 10 minute unless the hashrate drops or rises. It would take 2016 blocks to readjust.

There is a set limit, difficulty cannot rise more than that, not more than a factor of 4.

No confirmation time doesn't depend upon the difficulty of network. Miner have to accept it to include it in their block to make transaction as confirmed. The only solution to make faster confirmation is by increasing fee you are willing to pay. Now blockchain have also raised their default fee the speed up the confirmation process.

i don't think i have noticed a real difference in seeing my transactions getting confirmed in the weekend. the longest i had to wait was nearly 50 minutes for my transaction to confirm with 10k sat fee. and that was mid week.

i cant say ive noticed any difference in speed of transaction at weekends. i only use the default fee which i believe is 10k and ive had no problems. i will keep an eye out next time i spend on the weekend and see what happens though.

Next time pay the right fee and I think it will be confirmed within te first 6 blocks.

Many faucets pay out over weekends, so the transactions will be slightly higher during these periods. I guess many businesses also pay salaries on Fridays and this will also have

a influence. I know I use Bitcoin a bit more over weekends, when I go to the pub with friends, and we all pay for the drinks and snacks in Bitcoin.

I have not seen a difference, because I pay a slightly higher miners fee than the default and that seems to bump my confirmations a little. You have to pay for speed.  ::)

Yeah. My transactions also take longer on the weekend compared to during the week. I guess we need more miners to fix this problem.

May be too many user so it coz the traffic jam ?

Are the people complaining all in America? I'm in Europe, and I haven't noticed anything different on week-ends in the Paris/Rome time zone during day time.

I used to believe there were more transactions on weekdays, and I just can't understand why confirmations would be longer on Friday nights. I've never seen anyone paying with BTC at a bar.

I feel the reason behind the transactions taking a very long time to confirm on weekends and Friday,it may happens due to the internet network disturbances and due to many transactions happening at the same timings per second. Now the Bitcoins market is growing. Each and every day.

I believe that the delay on weekends is because the most places,faucets,and others admins makes payments and when the community makes more transacctions,investments,withdraws anyway bitcoin is very fast dont take days to get the money just some minutes usually.Soo for sure and advantage against banks or others services companies of fiat,that only work along the week.