Bitcoin Forum

Hello, I have a friend who I sent Bitcoin to about 3 days ago and he needs it as quickly as possible. We have waited three days and he still hasn't received it yet. Is there any way the process could be sped up?
Thanks

You probably put too low fees.

You can ask on this thread for your transaction to be accelerated : https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5034315.0

Then I suggest learning more about fees by looking at this thread : https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5153031.0

What is the fee per vbyte on your transaction? You can find out by inputting your transaction ID in to this website: https://blockchair.com/. The likelihood is you simply paid too low a fee. The mempool has been periodically emptying over the last few days, but never below 2 sats/vbyte, so if you paid 1 or 2 sats/vbyte then you will still be waiting for confirmation.

You have a couple of options in this case. You can use "replace by fee" if you enabled it on your transaction to bump the fee to a higher value so it will confirm faster. Alternatively, your friend can use "child pays for parent" and simply spend the unconfirmed transaction with a much higher fee. When his new transaction is confirmed, your currently unconfirmed transaction will confirm at the same time. Further, if the transaction had a change output that you sent back to yourself, you can also use "child pays for parent" by spending this change output with a much higher fee.

There are at least two more possibilities as to why the transaction was reportedly not confirmed after three days. The first is that a friend isn't really a friend, and that it's a scam - and the second is that a friend has trouble syncing his wallet or maybe using some fake wallet.

Additional information such as wallets used in the transaction and a link to the transaction would be very helpful in determining where the problem occurred.

If you send your bitcoin from the wallet you have full control, you have to check mempool status (https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#1,24h) to see how the network is, look at fee rate layer and choose the fee rate that can help you have fast transaction.

At the moment, if you choose the last point on the time-series chart (third chart), you see the total size of transaction with fee rates 100⁺ is ~ 2.04 MB. It means you can expect your transaction will be confirmed ~ next 2 blocks if you set your fee rate at 100⁺ satoshi/ (v)byte. If you are not in a very hurry, you can choose the rate at 40⁺ satoshi/ (v)byte. The best is waiting for the weekend.

Mempool changes quickly and it can be cleared or filled up.

Some threads:

• Make sure to avoid wasting BTC for too high fees – step by step guide (Electrum) (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5182906.0) (this guide is outdated if you use the Electrum 4.0.2. The UI is changed)
• Fees are low, use this opportunity to Consolidate your small inputs! (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2848987.0)
• Bitcoin transaction fees (in sats/kb). Sunday, Saturday are best to move BTC (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5250569.0) (You can get cheap fee rate on any day but usually weekends have cheapest fee rates)

It would be much better if you shared the transaction ID here so that we can try to find out if the transaction;
1.  Has already been confirmed or not
2.  Was Replace-by-Fee(RBF) enabled or not

This can help members suggest to you the best way that transaction confirmed quickly.

Yes, this will help him find out the truth, it may be his friend wants to defraud him or his device contains malware that changes sending addresses while pasting. 8)

Not quite true. If you send it when the mempool is free then 1-5 sats/vbyte is enough. Other than that you can always send with 1 sats/vbyte if you don't need it to confirm quickly. Tron or other alts might be cheaper but the security of the network is way lower.

Are you sure you sent to the right address? Doublecheck it again, there are some bitcoin address swiching viruses out there, even if you copy the correct address, the malware highjacks your clipboard and put a hackers address there, can happen if you are using some random QR code reader too.

Your transaction problem is too low fee I guess so. In the last days, mempool is clear sometime but the lowest fee rate is not lower than 3 satoshi/vbyte (or maybe in very short time it drops to 2 satoshi/vbyte and bounces back and not all transactions with that rate were all confirmed).

You can check your transaction with block explorers (use it with Tor because they can track your IP address).

• Blockchair.com (https://blockchair.com/) (See the priority of your unconfirmed transaction)
• Joe hoe's site (https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#1,24h) (You can always estimate your transaction priority position with Joe hoe's site.
• List of useful Bitcoin block explorers (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5197909.0)