Bitcoin Forum

Anyone else notice an increase in unconfirmed transactions?

https://coincurrencynews.com/2016/10/20/blockchain-unconfirmed-transactions-increase/


Any idea why this could happen?

Because of block i think it takes some time before it confirmed and too much complaining so far as you can see there are so much transaction are unconfirmed so far because of too many request and the transactions increases that big.

interesting! there is currently 28K+ unconfirmed transactions according to blockchain.info.
but in my experience this usually happens for two reasons:
1) there is gap between blocks that were found (this is not the case here there were 5 blocks in last hour)
2) there is a spam attack going on (don't know how to find out if this is true or not!)

It's probably some of the same issues we've seen recently, is there a delayed block or a back-up with the chain? There might be some higher-fee transactions happening right now too, and those might be pushing the rest of the transactions back.

Inside this all unconfirmed transactions there are several types of transactions like;
-- some random zero fee transactions from newbies thinking fee is optional
-- very low fee for big size transaction which get stucked unconfirmed for several days
-- dust transactions associated with different failed attack attempts on bitcoin network

And recently there been lots of delay between finding blocks which also makes lots of transaction even with recommended high transaction fee getting stucked for several minutes/almost hour.

There might have been 5 blocks in the hour before you posted but steven0021 says that yesterday there were only 12 blocks over a span of 3 hours. Normally there should be 18 blocks over a span of 3 hours so the mempool got filled with unconfirmed transactions. I haven't heard about a spam attack recently.

Because of network limitation the maximum transaction capacity has been reached some time ago, the network has been congested and huge delays in confirmations occur since then.

Every time a lot of people have to transact using bitcoin this kind of stuff happens.

The following chart illustrates whats happening:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cu9ss99XgAEsXyX.jpg

1 mb block are getting saturated every time these days and also there is so much time gap between finding two consecutive blocks these days both may be causing higher amount of unconfirmed transaction clogging network.

The number of transactions increases.
Some did (and sometime do) spam attacks on the network and it takes time to clear up after those.
The 1MB limitation doesn't allow to add into a block all the unconfirmed transactions.
Some pools hunt the block reward and don't use the best of the block size to include all the transactions they could.

But it's OK. Those numbers will rise slowly and will force people to use common sense tx fees, not just rely that the network will work for them for free.

yeah this is part of the reason but so far unconfirmed transactions has been only in the range of 2000-3000 and it rarely goes any higher. and these txs are those with 0 fee and low fees, etc.

the 20k-30K unconfirmed transactions has been rare and as you can see the number of unconfirmed transactions has reached half the amount to 10K and decreasing fast.

they always happen when there is no blocks mined in a longer time than usual like an hour with no blocks.

Well, I haven't noticed any delay today. I made a transaction around 30 minutes ago and with transaction fee just slightly over 20,000 sats it took less than 5 minutes to get confirmations.

So I'm wondering are all those delays happening because very low transaction fees were included or you might have a delay even with higher transaction fees?

Well, it's an auction, if you pay high enough fee you'll always beat everybody else, but they cannot all win the auction.

You can check stats here:

https://btc.com/stats/unconfirmed-tx

actually just curious a bit why people are so stingy around crypto world,doesn't generalize,it's just a few but they won't even set the fee higher than 5 cents which is actually in 1st tier would couldn't getting used to buy food or you will got only few of candy,even it's for the sake of their transaction speed

I think that today you need at least 10k satoshi to see a transaction get relayed. Just you can still read here and there that 1k would do or you can - with luck - send even without fee. And that doesn't work for quite a while now, from what I know.
But people still use faucets. People still try to send under 1$ worth of Bitcoin from here to there. And for them the 6 cents is quite a big % of "their money".

I also use as low fees as I can, I just never complain of that. I even gave my example not long ago that my transaction took one entire night. But I was OK with that. But if we continue that, at some point the miners will halt their businesses (unless BTC price will get H U G E). So for now, the network enforcing in some way to become correct, is not a bad thing imho.

Thanks for your reply and thanks for the great link, I have bookmarked it because I think it's really helpful. But I can't agree that this is like an auction because in auction only one person wins a lot, so to win you should pay more than others. Here we have a slightly different situation - to be the winners, or in other words to have our transactions confirmed fast, we just shouldn't be among those who is paying much less than others.

It's an auction and there is more than 1 winner because there is more than 1 position being sold...

now a lot of transactions. plus a growing number of blocks. I think it's better to improve miners fee, so bitcoin faster delivery.  ;)

There are still blocks mined without adding all the possible transactions.

435062 (Main Chain)   2016-10-20 03:56:27   SlushPool   0000000000000000022a3b75e78da369c5f764d89075150ae7f7f01963e318e9   0.19
435081 (Main Chain)   2016-10-20 07:34:09   Telco 214   0000000000000000000368f0d5217977fa1b19112ea7da46b856f79fb041ec61   749.02

The last number is the size in kB.

The pool software or something needs fixed/optimized along with the increasing tx fees.

That happens when a block is found immediately after the other, I don't know if it can be fixed.

I don't think increasing transaction fee is the answer, this is how cabals take over financial system and will need to understand that you can never satisfy Greed it keeps asking for more, this may be a move by miners to delay moving transactions with low transaction fee.

The unconfirmed transactions pool is about 10 MB.
If you would find a block, would you relay any transactions or the ones with higher fee?
Greed is part of human nature...

The peak was 23 MB (wow), so the miners are doing their job nicely.

Increasing the transaction fee will shift the preference of other people to lower transaction fee coins. It is one of the feature why bitcoin is also popular.Though its not a good sign that more and more unconfirmed transaction piles up,better to addressed the problem now. The sooner the better.

Yes this is what we are experiencing this time. There is still 0 confirmation to the btc to my wallet its from 8 in the morning

 and now its already 7 in the evening in our place. I don't know also if when this will be confirmed  :'(

this is also what i fear.

i know very well that there are in fact a lot of other good benefits in using bitcoin that nothing else has. but one of these benefits has always been a cheap transaction fee.

and with the way the market for fees is increasing i don't really know how things are going to be like in the future as the competition to be included in a block gets harder and harder.

Sorry guys I cannot relate on that, I have no problem so far with transacting online. Mine, the 3 confirmation was done for less than an hour and I am contented with that speed.

You are right,increase the transaction fee will not be a good idea to welcome. Many people are very happy with Bitcoin due to it simplicity and very small transaction fee which is almost negligible compared to that one charged by the normal or fiat banking system.Hence, if you should increase the fee is like you are chasing people away fromusing Bitcoin which doing so is very bad.

...And the things are back to normal.
The pool of unconfirmed transactions became small/normal (2 MB ish from 23 MB) and I've just seen that a transaction with 1000 satoshi fee has been confirmed (of course, it took quite some time for that).

So whenever you want to send a transaction is good to check the network status and put the fee accordingly (and depending of your time too).
Sometimes you need higher fees, but it's still only sometimes.

Now the question remaining is who caused all that spam on the blockchain and why...

if the rate of unconfirmed transaction increase day by day then bitcoin network would become useless because if everyone face this proven then obviously they would quit bitcoin and as a whole user might leave the cryptocurrency world. so we should monitor this that why this is happening.

I assume your transaction is confirmed now. In case you run into the same problem again if you use Bitcoin core wallet you can now use a new option called -zapwallettxes which lets you remove stuck unconfirmed transactions, then try them again. The technical details of how to do it are at this link.

http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/45988/how-do-you-apply-zapwallettxes-on-windows

Actually this problem of unconfirmed transaction is mainly due to associating lower fee than recommended by network and many new people fail to understand the concept and importance of these fees and try to lower it even wallet recommend to use high fees. I have never got my transaction stucked for several days as i usually use the recommended fee by my wallet and to know recommended bitcoin fee by size of transaction i find this site helpful https://bitcoinfees.21.co/

If you are using Bitcoin Core, there is a way to flush all the unconfirmed transactions with the zapwallettx command line, but if this happens in any other wallet I dont know what I would do... it would suck if a transaction gets stuck forever.

I've just adopted the habit of adding a slightly higher fee than the recommended one, all my transactions confirm in under 10 minutes.
And it's not like I'm losing a lot of money on transaction fees.

currently while I am writing this post the number of unconfirmed transaction is about 11000 so think as compared to previous the number had came down to almost 80% but we cant be happy either because the number is continuously changing now and then.

The increase in unconfirmed transactions can be caused by the increased number of users who are using bitcoin. The number of users and the number of transactions they make daily causes a transaction traffic which is out of the capacity of the total existing miners. Since the hashing power is lesser than the actual transactions made then the more transactions left unconfirmed and being piled up. But there is nothing to worry since when the traffic has slow down those unconfirmed transactions will actually be catered also.

Probably because fees are increasing, and people want to pay the same amount. For example I am paying 10k satoshis in fees no matter how big or small my transaction is. But you can't do this if you need it confirmed fast - I don't care much about the confirmation time.