Bitcoin Forum

Since i wait for 2 transactions to get confirmations since more than a day now i checked the blockchain.info unconfirmed transactions and found that there are even unconfirmed transactions from 2012...

How is that possible? I dont want to be in the situation having sent such a transaction. I mean what should i do then? The receiver claims he didn't get anything and demands his coins. But when i send again it might happen that 2 transactions go through.

Im pretty sure that the previous transactions will go through but as always its no fun to explain to the receiver what happened.

You haven't provided any examples, so I don't know how it's possible.


Most likely these transactions were dropped from the memory pool of all the peers long ago.  If they aren't confirmed yet, they won't get confirmed unless either the sender or receiver are continuing to re-broadcast them.

If something like this were to happen, you'd need to get some technical assistance in creating a transaction that spends the specific inputs from that transaction.  That way you could be certain that the earlier transaction would no longer exist as a valid transaction.

You can see all unconfirmed transactions here: https://blockchain.info/de/unconfirmed-transactions
If you go to the very last page you can see 2 transactions from 2012.

I now have a transaction that didnt go through since 2 days now. Not very funny because the guy that got it wanted to forward it already. I normally dont use a fee as long as i dont need to so that transaction had no fee too. When i tested using fees i never had an advantage so i dropped using them. Thats what i hear from others too by the way. Even though its said that it will speed up things. I cant confirm that. But now i wonder if a minimum fee would have made a difference.

But anyway... unconfirmed transactions seems to be a problem for a currency and the trust in it. You are in a bad situation then.

It does make a difference. Yesterday I made a high priority transaction without a fee and it took 13 hours to confirm. Little by little free transactions are becoming a thing of the past :).

I had the same thought too. Maybe the miner force the users to use higher fees.

The transaction i did 2 days ago now vanished from blockchain.info. I sent the transaction again now and it went through, though i used a fee this time. 0.0005BTC to be sure. Though i wonder if the other transaction now can still go through and i have that failed transaction still in my electrum, so that i cant access those coins. Though i dont want to rebuild my wallet because of this stupid thing.

What do you think about that TID? fab42a4edaedcfd8cb88a902e54ce6da14de3b7b447bbdea2ff647b39f19af98

I had another transaction of 1.1btc that i send 2 days ago too and it still has no confs too. Though i sent other transactions without fees now and they went through fine and fast.

I dont like that. It looks like Bitcoin is unreliable, letting coins flying in limbo only because the biggest miners think they have to enforce fees. A currency with transactions that got stuck... i thought thats something i can blame paypal for only.

That's probably a bug in blockchain.info's site. No miner is keeping 2 year old transactions in memory.


Fees are required for some transactions. When people try to save money by omitting fees they end up with unconfirmed transactions. You should leave fee calculation to Electrum and not adjust it manually.

Electrum enforces fees already when needed. Thats a thing i like with electrum. Mostly i use no fee and when the electrum servers accept it it goes through, if not they claim a fee is needed. And the minimum fee of 0.0001btc is enough then.

So yesterday, after the old transaction was deleted from blockchain.info's unconfirmed transactions, i sent another transactions. Today i check electrum and... both transactions gone through... *sigh*

Thats not good when you can't trust the bitcoin network. No harm is done because i know the receiver and have to deal with him again. But its not cool definitely. Other users might get real problems.

Those two transactions seem to be duplicates of previous txes.

E.g 4005d6bea3a93fb72f006d23e2685b85069d270cb57d15f0c057ef2d5e3f78d2

So you mean blockchain.info should go through their list of unconfirmed trnasactions because they probably will have a couple of duplicates in there? I wonder whats the real amount of unconfirmed transactions then.
And i think blockchain.info should stop deleting transaction-ids when after the deletion those transactions still can go through. That does look even worse to newbies and they think the transaction is dead.