Bitcoin Forum

Hi, im supposed to receive a BTC transaction but its been 2 days and still unconfirmed. Would appreciate some help in figuring out why please.

Send paid Fee
0.00010000 BTC
(19.268 sat/B - 4.817 sat/WU - 519 bytes)

Could there be other issues?

That transaction pays a really small fee compared to other transactions which are currently in the mempool. It pays 19 sat/byte fee while ~170 sat/byte is required to get a transaction confirmed in a few blocks. You can wait or ask the sender to bump the fee if transaction was marked as replaceable or use CPFP (https://bitcoinelectrum.com/how-to-do-a-manual-child-pays-for-parent-transaction/) (spend those coins with a fee higher than 170 sat/byte). I have linked you a guide for Electrum, but it should be possible in most wallets too. What wallet are you using?

so its really a matter of fees.
so it will v likely get confirmed in a couple of days or else it will be reversed?

Transactions that don't get confirmed will be returned to the address they were sent from if they remain in the mempool for two weeks. If you are not in a hurry, it's best to wait. Your funds can't be lost. Wait and see what will happen during the weekend when the mempool usually empties and the fees drop.

By default, transactions are dropped after 2 weeks. However, that depends on the node. You should be fine for the next few days, but we can't predict if the mempool is going to clear up soon so you might end up using CPFP. If your transaction is dropped from the mempool then the sender will be able to spend the funds again without any problems (if the transaction is marked as replaceable then it doesn't matter; it can be replaced even when it is in the mempool; dropped transactions can be rebroadcast by anyone unless they are no longer valid).

i see. thanks for ur help guys. hopefully it confirms soon.

Currently there are more than 20 blocks full of transaction with a fee higher than 20 sat/B.

If you are not in a hurry, you can wait it out until it gets confirmed or dropped from the mempool.
However, if you want/need it to confirm soon, you can always either Replace-by-Fee (if the flag is set; which wallet did you use?) or a Child-pays-for-parent if you have control over at least 1 output (e.g. change).

If the transaction still not confirmed you can use the ViaBTC accelerator.
Since the fee of your transaction is 10k sat you are able to submit your TXID on ViaBTC.

You can find it from here https://www.viabtc.com/tools/txaccelerator/

If you receive something like "Submissions are beyond the limit, Please try again" just keep submitting your TXID every few minutes or exactly 1 hr sharp (e.g. exactly 1 pm not 1:01 or 1:30). So check your local time and wait for the next 100 free accelerators on ViaBTC every hour. Until you get a green notification that your TXID is submitted and sent.

Check out the average fee here https://www.blockchain.com/explorer?view=btc_averagefee, don't worry your transaction will confirm soon.

This kind of average fee is completely useless; it serves information purpose only. Most miners want to maximize their earnings so they mostly choose transactions which pay more satoshi per byte than other transactions. The current average fee (0.00066333 BTC) would be too high for a small transaction (1 inputs, 2 outputs) and too low for any large transaction. Most wallets don't allow you to set a fixed fee anyway.

You should not spend smaller inputs during peak times, if however you do have larger inputs to spend your transaction will be confirmed much faster even with a lower fee. But eventually all transactions do get confirmed, they get sent to the mem-pool for miners to prioritise them according to the fees a little like bribing your way to the top  :)

Clients do that by default [1].
And the amount (balance) of the input doesn't make the transaction faster or slower, it's still the fee rate (sat/vB).

The issue with "smaller inputs" is a transaction might need more than 3 of them to fill the amount to be sent making the transaction's size higher,
the higher the transaction's size, the higher the total transaction fee based from the "fee-per-vbyte" will be.

[1] Clients will select the right input(s) that's enough to pay the receiver by default, not just spend random ones.