Bitcoin Forum

Address to recipient is correct. I consider myself an advanced user when it comes to Electrum. Have had a wallet for 2 years now and have made about 40 transactions. Never had this issue before. Is there a way to please fix this so my 147$ in BTC do not get lost in the abyss. Can provide more info if someone can please help or explain if there was an error in the blockchain for any reason. Thanks. KINDA URGENT PLEASE HELP

You can't lose anything unless you have sent them to the wrong address, relax. If the transaction doesn't get confirmed you will get your coins back, if not it will arrive on the new address. Don't worry about it.

I can understand as a newbie you are worrying but you dont need any help in this because some times transactions are delayed even for 10-12 hours and that happened with me as well.But just wait more couple of more hours may be and i am sure your transaction will be confirmed.
Dont worry

You haven't provided enough information to determine what the problem is.

If you could provide any of the following, we could analyze the transaction and explain to you why it is still pending, and what you can do in the future to prevent the problem.

• Transaction ID
• Address you sent the bitcoins to
• Address in Electrum at which you initially received the bitcoins before spending/sending them

Transaction ID   d7d21f4271b74705101edb4cc7db14
                      7ed5d2038ddc39cde947f75be32bb4e36f

that tx is unconfirmed. there's currently a huge backlog of unconfirmed transactions:

 https://tradeblock.com/bitcoin/

everyone is affected not just electrum users. there is nothing you can do but wait it out.

No. It is not because there is a "backlog" but rather because his transaction fee is much too small. He is paying only ~10 satoshis/byte. According to http://bitcoinfees.21.co/, the current recommended fee to get the transaction into the next block is 100 satoshis/byte.

yeah i didn't notice that. that is way too low. still the solution is the same. he has to wait it out.

in the meantime maybe we can help him learn how to set more reasonable fees? what version of electrum are you using @revenga?

As achow101 has pointed out, your transaction only included a transaction fee of 0.00005 BTC (that's 0.05 mBTC). Given the current level of bitcoin traffic, if you want your transaction to confirm quickly, a more appropriate transaction fee would have been 0.00052 BTC (0.52 mBTC).  Therefore, this transaction paid 0.00047 BTC (0.47 mBTC) less in fees than it probably should have.

There are a variety of ways you could have ended up with an insufficient fee, such as:

• You used a wallet that lets you set your fees, and you chose to set the fee too low
• You used poorly written wallet software that sets the fees for you, and doesn't compute an adequate fee.
• You used software that listens to the bitcoin network to see what the current "typical" fee for fast confirmation is, and didn't give the wallet enough time to discover an appropriate fee.

If you aren't in a hurry, you can just wait.  There's a chance that the transaction could confirm sometime in the next few days.

If it doesn't confirm in the next couple of days, then you'll have a few different options on how to deal with the situation depending on what wallet software you are using.

Some wallets (such as blockchain.info) will eventually simply forget that the transaction ever existed. When that happens, they will show the bitcoins that you sent back under your control so that you can try a sending a new transaction.

Other wallest (such as Bitcoin Core) will continue to re-broadcast the transaction forever as long as you leave the software running.  It will simply wait forever for the transaction to become confirmed.  If you want to give up on the transaction in a wallet like that, then you'll need to take additional steps to tell the wallet to forget the transaction.

I'm not an expert with Electrum, so I'm not sure how your version of Electrum chooses fees, or how to get it to forget transactions.  I see that this thread has now been moved to the "Electrum" sub-forum.  Hopefully, someone with more Electrum knowledge can help you with the next steps that are available to you.

In the meantime, it would be helpful to know what version of Electrum you are running.

Electrum has the option to set Dynamic fees; it will choose an optimal fee based upon the current state of the network. However, IIRC it is not enabled by default. To enable it, go to Tools > Preferences and check the box labeled "Dynamic Fees". Then you can move the fee multiplier to get a higher fee. The higher fee multiplier means that you will get a fee more likely to get your transaction confirmed in the next block.