Bitcoin Forum

Hello,

Yesterday I transferred some BTC from my Electrum wallet to Poloniex using the lowest possible transaction fee in Electrum (1 Satoshi per Kb). So for the 487 kB transferred I paid only 487 Satoshis. I knew that it would take 10 hours or more. Now since 24 hours are gone, the money is still in limbo and the block explorer still shows "unconfirmed transaction (0/3 confirmations)".

I fear that I was a little too stingy with the fees. How long do you estimate will it take for the money to be confirmed? 1 week? Or more?

Thanks!

it is B (Byte) not kB (kilo Byte) i really doubt you had a transaction as big as 487 kB! that is half a block size...

it depends on the "situation" :)
you should trust Electrum to give you a good estimate. it has been good so far that i am using it. the "situation" is based on the number of unconfirmed translations in the mempool and the fee that others are paying (the competition). when the competition is fierce you need to pay higher amount and if you pay less your priority will be low so your transaction will take a long time to confirm.

for example 6 days ago i sent a transaction with 4 satoshi/B fee and it was instantly confirmed (a couple of seconds as 1 block was found immediately after i broadcast the tx).
but today mempool i full AKA there is competition so the same amount of fee will be low priority.

I'm trying to avoid low fee ransactions because usometimes they could realy take a long time to be done. I had few situations ehrn they have took even days and I don't want to wait that long. I use the wallet that estimates and recommends the fees so I choose some from the offered and I have no problems with confirmations.

If you are in a rush to get your transaction through don't even think about paying low fees. Is the stress really worth it?

Regarding the time it will take, that fully depends on how congested to blockchain is. If there are a lot of transaction waiting, those with higher fees are more likely to go first.

It looks like there are about 4500 unconfirmed transactions according to blockchain.info , which means it should go through at one point.

For low fee transactions it says 3 comfirmations are received between 1 hour and 1 day. If there are more than 3 days since your transaction without 3 comfirmations then you have to do something. These days the average confirmation time was between 13 minutes and 1 hour. For your transaction the confirmation time is between 3-10 hours.
https://blockchain.info/charts/avg-confirmation-time

You may just want to push it with ViaBtc to make it faster.
If you are just testing then it will really take a while you might want to avoid doing that again. But I heard news that even at a low fee the transactions are getting faster. Havent tries it yet but will later. 500 satoshis is too low and you should know that.

ViaBTC doesn't push zero fee or very low fee transactions. If the fee is reasonable (although low) , the transaction will get confirmed. Otherwise, the transaction will go out of the mem pool and you can try again.

I assume you mean 1 satoshi per byte, and not kilobyte. I've used fees as low as 4 satioshi per byte when the fees were unusually high, it took around an hour to get it confirmed. Maybe try using a tool like ViaBTC to get it confirmed faster?
Normally I tend to use around 10 satoshi per byte, but when I'm in a hurry I use 200-300 s/B. I've found this site extremely useful when dealing with bitcoin fees https://bitcoinfees.21.co

It's impossible to estimate, since it looks like there are intermittent spam attacks that are indefinitely holding up your transaction. 21.co estimates that a transaction with a 1-20 satoshi/byte fee will be confirmed within ~7 blocks. But you are at the very bottom of that band, and like I said, the spam is keeping median fees significantly higher than they were a week ago.

Electrum usually makes the transaction replaceable (RBF) with a fee that low. If you right-click on the transaction, can you select "replace?"

The time your transaction might take can't be known, because the transactions pending already might have paid more fees than you have, and they are more likely to get confirmed before yours. Well, i can try to push your transaction a bit, and it may take a little less time to get confirmed. Can you submit the tx of your transaction?

You had a bad timing with your transaction. The last 3 weeks the mempool was constantly empty. All my transactions I did with 1 Satoshi/Byte went right into the next block.

For some reason, yesterday morning the mempool filled instantly from one minute to the next from 500 pending transactions to over 30000 pending transactions (and also with quite high fees).

Today we are down at about 10000 pending transactions.

I'm not sure if this is another spam attack we already had a month ago, or what else is going on since yesterday.

Thanks a lot for your replies. I've learned a lot and will never make a transaction with a 1 Satoshi/Byte fee again. My transaction is still in limbo. Electrum shows "Replaceable" and I could increase the amount of fees but my balance is 0 (I sent all the money in the Wallet to Poloniex). There seems to be now way to cancel the unconfirmed transaction. So I would have to buy some BTC first just to increase the fees in order to speed up the transaction.
I think I will wait a bit longer and see what happens. Either it goes through within the next days or (don't know if that can happen) the transaction get kicked from the mempool and I can try again to transfer the money. But this time with a higher fee.  ::)  ;D

ViaBTC has a minimum transaction fee of 0.0001 BTC that the transaction must have in order to be "pushable" by them.

As I can see there is no reason, except the greed of miners, for transaction with low fee don't go through quickly because the mempool is almost empty and the network is far from being  congested

Checked this morning and my transaction finally went through.  ;D After almost 48 hours. So everything is fine but I will definitely pay a little bit more next time, even if I have the time. Maybe 4 or 5 Sat per Byte, not only 1 Sat per Byte. Thanks for all your help. Much appreciated.

yes I agree with you,deals with low cost will take a lot of time,
I prefer high cost but fast and smooth transaction,
because there are also transactions up to 2 days no confirmation,it is very annoying

just remember that whenever you chose to experiment (risk waiting a long time) with low fees, make sure to mark your transaction as RBF so that you have less headache in the future in case you wanted to "bump the fee".
and since you are using Electrum, it is very easy and user friendly thing to do. you just enable "Replace by fee" from the preference and then simply select a checkbox to make the transaction RBF. and later on if you wanted to increase the fee you just right click on the transaction and select the respective option.

Is it possible to tush transaction if you set 0 fee by mistake?

You can decide how much fees you wish to pay easily. However you are going to make the transaction painfully slow if you make the fees minuscule in amount. I had once paid very small fees for a 0.05BTC transfer and it took me 2 weeks to get in confirmed. But you can speed up the transaction by an east method since you use Electrum. There is an option to increase fees in case you need it.

I have actually paid around 7 sat per Byte fee yesterday and it got confirmed under 200 minutes which is quite amazing for me LOL.
Fee only cost me around $0.05 to move $100+ this is the lowest fee I have ever paid in any payment methods when moving amount like this. Who is still saying paying with bitcoin is expensive?  8) 8) ;D

You can increase it to near 10 sat/byte so that it can be confirmed within 24 hour like mine. If you include atleast some fee than it will eventually get confirmed, nothing to worry about that.

This site can really help you out - https://bitcoinfees.21.co/

Depends of how much is fee if I can remember

Thanks so much!! I'll take a look today  :D