Bitcoin Forum

I've just sent a 2.99 BTC using electrum, and it apparently has a bug where it's on the lite mode it doesn't include any transaction fee at all
I'll e-mail them about this bug later, but now I'm worried that my coins be stuck in limbo

I have heard some people say 3 days and the worst I have heard is almost a week

It really depends on the specifics of your transaction.

How many bytes?

How many bitcoins in the smallest output?

How many confirmations do the inputs have?

If you can post the transactionID or the bitcoin address, it would help to tell you more about it.

Here it is
93ffbc1b96cab642f0ac5c4b4b19ba3253fc28d2ab1516a367222d0e25631954

No, I don't, but both "Danny" and "Hamilton" are very common names.

Hmm.  I don't see that transaction on the network at all.  I don't think many peers are relaying it.  You might need to find someone from the Electrum forum that can help you remove the transaction from your wallet so you can re-send it.

Where do these transaction fees go to exactly?

To the miners or mining pools who solve the current block. That is their incentive to process/verify transactions.

I thought that their incentive was the chance to discover a new block of bitcoins?

No. That's just the incentive to create blocks, but the miner gets to choose which transactions to include in the block.  If you are a miner and you can choose to either confirm the transactions that will pay you 0.0005 BTC, or the transactions that will pay you 0.0 BTC, which transactions are you going to choose to include in the block that you are working on?

Space in the block is limited, so if I were a miner, I'd choose the transactions that paid me the highest fees per byte.

Now if there is still some space left in the block after I've already included all the fee paying transactions, then I might fill in the rest of the space with free transactions since it doesn't really cost me any more to include them and doing so increases the popularity of the bitcoin system as a whole.  Any free transactions that don't fit in the block once it is full will just have to wait for a later block.  If there are a lot of fee paying transactions, then the free ones might have to wait a long time for the transaction activity to drop to a point where there is room for them.

Ahhhhhh. I see.

Is the block choosing process automatic or manual?

Many miners and pools use Bitcoin-Qt (or bitcoind) to create the blocks.  In that case it is automatic.  It is possible to write your own program for building blocks (which some pools have done).  If you use a custom program for building blocks, then you can control what criteria are used for selecting the transactions.

Thanks! Appreciate it!

Opened the wallet again and the transaction was gone, but it still said I had no funds to complete de transfer. I closed it again, opened and quickly resent, with the transfer fee included.
And the coins were transfered.

What a weird bug, I will no longer use electrum