Bitcoin Forum

I've moved a few BTC over the last few days and transactions have been lightning fast. Confirms almost immediately. This is the fastest that BTC has ever been for me.

What's going on??

I've been hearing horror stories about transaction times for months. Have I just been lucky??

There's a funny correlation between BU pretty much failing and the number of unconfirmed transactions going down right after. It's almost as if the network was spammed deliberately to promote BU...

you could try to spin it that way.
but https://bitcoinfees.21.co/ tells everybody who is curious about that level of supplied fees - has been rising on average. once supplying 100 Satoshis has been a completely sufficient choice, to get through.
now that drags you below 1380 minutes delay, up to infinity.

getting slower?   ;D

I only track the number of unconfirmed transactions (https://blockchain.info/q/unconfirmedcount) for a long time, several times a day and it definitely went down. Now it's at 19k and it was around up to 80k for a while and then a rapid drop.

Graph: https://blockchain.info/charts/mempool-count?timespan=30days

The most telling chart is the one year one. Simply no real issue until Oct 2016.

Only noticed it recently

I think we should just be glad that the transactions are being fast right now,
Hope that it would stay that way even if the number of people who are using btc is now enormous.

I agree, just had a transaction with a recommended $5 fee due to it being my dust collecting address. So yeah pretty big, so I altered it to 4000 satoshi and it went through pretty much straight away. I was expecting it to get stuck for a week and refunded, so was pleasantly surprised.

What we are calling "dust" today could be "dollar cents" tomorrow. So there must be a way to send for near-to-zero-fees and getting through eventually. Trading time vs. costs so these sorts of transactions would have to "pay in time".


That is a nifty chart. I can compare with my visual impression of logged in people at Poloniex, either from trollbox activity or their own numbers stated, and acknowledge there ARE more people using crypto. Definitely.
But that number ranks up slow and steady almost linear to time. Means mempool fill levels got gamed, and a distinct level of required fees would squench that afford.

Yes, good chart. Looks like I was sending BTC during a dip in transactions.

These horror stories are usually told by newbies, or users completely unaware of how bitcoin transaction works.
They use old version of wallet or manually decrease fee to the lowest possible amount and as result we have massive number of underpaid transactions.
I am not saying that current high fees are OK, they certainly aren't but with proper fee your transaction will be confirmed very fast.

Proper fee like 5-6$ ? Most transactions probably involve less than 100$ worth of btc, so that's insane.

You sent at the right time, Due to the little amount of unconfirmed transaction and combined with reliable fees will make your transaction gets confirmed just in 10 minutes.
Yes, you have. But it can't be called 100% luck, It depends on the network condition.
If you have tried to make a transaction at the traffic of bitcoin network is quiet.

That's normal if your transaction gets delivered so fast.

I've been using Bitcoin for over 4 years, dozens of times a week and I have never had a transaction taking longer than a day. Not even from greedy/terribly setup exchanges with 0 fees. Anecdotal evidence? Sure, but so are the horror stories.

Checking back at the last month my trsansaction fees were 180 satoshis per byte on average and I never had any issues. I don't think I had any transaction taking over 2-3 hours to get confirmed.

But then again I don't use dozens of accounts to send funds from - which all Bitcoin users should understand, along with the fact the Bitcoin is not intended for dust transactions for a long while now (which is completely fine).

yeah if you have no idea what bitcoin is and what you are doing, you pay 5-6% fee. otherwise for the rest of us the fees are still $0.4 worst case scenario at the peak of the spam attack. and at normal times it is still less than $0.1

Looks like you have send you BTC at the right time when there were just few unconfirmed transaction and bitcoin network wasn't that busy.
Im guessing those days we're weekends of holidays or i guess those horror stories were just meant to scare as of, basically a hoax.

I think you have paid good fee (more than the recommended one) so that your transaction get confirmation within next block. Another reason for this could be less number of unconfirmed transactions stucked at mempool during time of your transaction.

I also believe this, BU is the one who is behind all those attack on bitcoin network. However they don't have any good dev behind to fix a small bug in their software. They are losing support these days so they have also stopped flooding network with spam transactions.

Yeah , these are also factor for the speed confirmation that result for the confirmation of your transaction but probably I think you don't know the rules of the fee system .
Because all this Depends upon the fee you can see at bitcoinfees.21.co that is suitable for single transaction .
The amount of the fee depends upon the input and output of the numbers of the transaction with that amount of bitcoin that you want transfer .
Usually if you paid fee of 150sat/byte then your confirmation will goes smoothly with 10-20 minutes .

I hope the spammer's money ran out and that it will be the end of these silly spam attacks or could it be that they are using the spam budget now, to fund the $500 000 bounty to bribe the miners?  :P At some point in time the budget for these spam attacks must reach a point where it cannot be sustainable to do it anymore and the gains from doing this will outweigh the advantages of doing this. ^smile^

I hope to always be fast in running the transaction because the bitcoin users very much and probably will increase every month.

maybe your just lucky because if you will look here https://blockchain.info/unconfirmed-transactions
there still a lot of unconfirmed transaction some people dont pay enough fee and also because of some people spam the network recently

Once I waited 7 days for confirmation, and that was the longest waiting for transaction to confirm, from xapo  wallet to one casino. Xapo still doesn't have fees for sending, so I can't complaint to much, sometimes its very fast, but sometimes I need to wait and I don't mind, I suggest everyone to not get annoyed with this, its normal.

There might be something to it. I had really bad experiences with transactions early this year and it started getting better last month.
I've been checking the number of transactions awaiting confirmation and it's been on the decrease for the last couple weeks.

And how to attract new customers? The experienced might know about mempool tide and how to conquer situation by adapting their fee payments. I had taken my time to gather that knowledge.
The entry should be easier to handle.

The mempool tide has caused more than 140000 transactions on the queue to get confirmation. This is just because of the increased transactions getting added in a short time period. For faster confirmation bigger transaction fee is the only go, else need to wait more than weeks.

Yes, but a couple of quarters are still stupidly cheap for transactions considering the benefits of Bitcion. Either you have a spammed and bloated blockchain or a genuine competition based around transactions fees.

As much drama and ridiculous fork attempts are going on for bigger blocks, the current system is capable of holding the number of non-peanut transactions for years to come (not indefinitely though).

Bitcoin simply shouldn't be used for dust transactions anymore which is fine; there are dozends of coins to chose from to do that. But the loud minority on various forums are going apeshit in the delusion of representing every Bitcoin user screaming for bigger blocks while the silent majority is doing perfectly fine with the current block size.

The transaction now is getting slower and slower and the confirmations takes a lot of times but i can still experience the speed of confirmation that i get used to, which is about 10 minutes to get a confirmation and i just pad at least 50k satoshi fee for that and i think that is a good range of a fee and still fair so i think it is just always depends on the fee.

Normal in the digital era and "internet of money" ? No. It's just normal with bitcoin.

exactly. it is normal for bitcoin, the only "internet of money"

you don't see the same in anything else because nobody even cares enough to do a spam attack on them. but when you are a new technology that a large number of people use and not just hold on their exchanges to dump as fast as possible, then you get so many attention from all different directions.

and these attentions are sometimes negative, in forms of attacks. one form of these attacks is the spam attack that we are experiencing.

then when the whole system is decentralized and big and also under a lot of FUD and propaganda, it is sometimes hard to come to a consensus compared to a centralized altcoin which forks as the centralized authority seems fit.

Even wire transfers often take a single business day to complete in the advent of paying $20+. The thing with bitcoin is that it's supposed to capitalize on its speed and cost-efficient transactions but with recent spams on the mempool, it's not performing as it should. Also, there's no harm in paying a couple dolars for your transaction to be included in the next block, but that would kill micro transactions which bitcoin was known for. This is not normal, and everyone with money that needs to be transferred WOULD be annoyed.

I am paying $1 or lower usually but I get my transaction confirmed in just 20 minutes, the maximum waiting time is 1 hour which just occurred one time . So he should only pay that kind of amount when you need ut ti be confirmed 2-3 mins  .
Wallets shouldering their users miner fees will not last and you can't also expect that your transaction will be confirmed quickly .  In fact it will be poorly handled as the time pass by .

If I don't really need the bitcoins then I don't mind waiting for a couple of days but a week is too much .

Well it might be luck, but it's mainly because of fees usually.
Would you say you sent a "decent" fee? Just wondering.

I guess the transaction is becoming slower because of so many transaction that is happening at the same time we know that the bitcoin user's are increasing so no doubt that the bitcoin transactions also increase and i guess thats many transaactions slower to confirm in the blockchain but still a great news if the community is increasing.

Is there a spam attack going on right now?  Iv'e had some very high fee transactions that would usually get picked up in 1 block still unconfirmed for hours now.