Bitcoin Forum

Hi guys!

N00b help here!

I'm trying to send some BTC from my Bitcoin Core wallet to coinbase.

Coinbase have the transaction as sending but core says 0/unconfirmed, in memory pool and I can't find it in the blockchain at all!

What do you need info wise to be able to give me some help and advice?

Thanks in advance!

When did you send the transaction, do you know what fee you are using, and is core fully synced?

Can you right click the transaction and get it's transaction ID and post it here?

Yup it's fully synced.

The ID is : ecb4d354df52519538a47f930e5b715a097c07fa4863b06a2eaa74d253f50f58

I sent it at 18:47 GMT so about 3 hours ago.

Fee...

Debit: -0.05172646 BTC
Transaction fee: -0.00015183 BTC
Net amount: -0.05187829 BTC

Your transactions (https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/transaction/ecb4d354df52519538a47f930e5b715a097c07fa4863b06a2eaa74d253f50f58) pays the lowest possible fee rate of 1sat/B.

This is fine and not a problem. But with the current mempool status, your transaction won't confirm within the next few hours or even days.

Luckily, RBF (Replace-by-fee) is enabled which means you can "bump" the fee to get it confirmed faster.
If you don't want to wait, you can either use the bitcoin-cli to bump the fee by using the bumpfee command (replace TXID with your transaction id):

Or, the 2nd more easy option would be to export the private key(s) of the sending address(es) and import them into electrum (https://electrum.org/#home). Then you can simply check the history tab and right-click the transaction to bump the fee.

What fee would you recommend?

This is very dependent on the current mempool status.

How fast do you want your transaction to be confirmed?
Check out https://core.jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#0,24h (https://core.jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#0,24h). Scroll to the 3rd graph. The fee should be less than 1MB from the tip if you want it to confirm within the next few blocks.

For a confirmation in the next block a fee of roughly 140 sat/vB would be recommended.
If the next few blocks are enough, 60-90 sat/vB might be enough.

Please keep in mind that these numbers are just an estimation. It heavily depends on how the network behaves. How many blocks get mined how fast and how much transactions with what fee will be added to the mempool.

90 sat/vB would cost me how much?

Coinbase will show your transacion as "pending" until it gets 1 confirmation.
A 90 sat/vb would cost 0.0136647btc (if am not mistaken). 90 times the fee you paid with 1 sat/vb.
Your transaction size is too big because it consumes too many inputs (103).
Paying 1/4th in fees seems a bit too much and I wouldn't bump the fees right now, if I were you, unless am really in a hurry.

As the above calculation 0.0136647 fee is very high it's around 314.1USD in preev.

If you are not in hurry I suggest you wait for a day or more and wait for your transaction to be confirmed.
Or if the transaction is rejected after a day you can consolidate all of your inputs it means that combine them into one. If you have a single input you can get less transaction fee.

You can follow the guide from LoyceV here https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2848987.0

If I were you It's better to wait until the mempool size drop than paying 314.1USD.

You've been collecting Bitcoin dust. This isn't the moment to consolidate 15,000 bytes of small inputs. If you really want to make a transaction now, you should first Enable coin control features in Bitcoin Core Settings, then select Inputs on the Send tab, sort them by Amount, and manually choose the highest inputs only.

Look at these inputs:
https://loyce.club/other/dust.png
I've set it to show USD instead of BTC because it's easier to see low amounts. The 17.06 USD and 33.27 USD are perfectly fine to send right now. If you select those, you pay a reasonable fee.
However, all those inputs less than a dollar can easily eat up more in fees than they're worth. So leave them out, or select them in a separate transaction that will consolidate (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2848987.0) maybe even weeks later (as long as Bitcoin Core keeps broadcasting the transaction).

---

---

In the future, if possible: switch to using a Bech32 Segwit address (the one starting with bcq1). It reduces your sending fees.

---

---

Lol :P
Just so you know: after you've secured your Bitcoin, you also own about $22 worth of Forkcoins (https://blockchair.com/search?q=1Kfk9m2EopobQH1Ea3sb3K26GqhefsFobr). Getting them is a bit above n00b level though, and you shouldn't try to get them before all your Bitcoins are confirmed on a new address.

So it's not quite as bad as your picture makes it out to be. The USD value showed in that picture is based on the price of the coins when OP received then, which was generally back in 2016. Those 10 cent outputs are now worth around $4.

While this is obviously true, it is probably not the most important thing for OP to focus on. Reducing the number of inputs he is using will provide a far greater fee saving than switching 100 inputs from Legacy to SegWit.

Two suggestions for OP:

• These coins have sat dormant for 4 years. They can sit dormant for another few days until the mempool empties down to 1 sat/vbyte. Just be patient, otherwise you will lose hundreds of dollars worth of BTC in fees.
• Stop accepting such small outputs. I don't know where you were withdrawing such small amounts of coins from at the time (I assume faucets because the majority of exchanges, casinos, etc. have a minimum withdrawal amount), but it makes far more sense to wait until you have a reasonable amount of bitcoin and then withdraw it all at once. If you were spending 1 input here rather than 100, your transaction could have confirmed in minutes for a fraction of the fee you are paying.

You're right, I forgot about that. There's the current values:
https://loyce.club/other/dust2.png
The rest of the story stays the same :)

Back in the day I spent $100 on Genesis Mining, got paid into my wallet like that pretty much daily.

I'm with you that it's worth waiting as I imagine the mempool will clear over Christmas!

It's obviously far too late to do anything about these outputs now, but if you are still involved in mining then you should wait until you have accumulated a much larger mining reward before withdrawing. Once a week or a couple of times a month is far more appropriate than daily.

Not necessarily. The period surrounding Christmas in previous years hasn't shown any noticeable change to whatever the mempool was doing at the time - if it was empty it remained empty, if it was full it remained full. Since unlike stocks, bitcoin is tradable 24/7/365, and large amounts of volume come from places like China which only have a very small Christian population, then commonly observed holidays in America and Europe often don't make any difference to the mempool.

The mempool has fallen from about 62 MB to about 42 MB in the last 24 hours, and I would expect it to fall a bit more over the coming 24 hours, but with the ongoing price surge in bitcoin it is unlikely the mempool will clear down to as low as 1 sat/vbyte for the foreseeable future. You could bump the fee up to 10-15 sats/vbyte or so (which would be in the region of $35-50) and that might get you confirmed over the weekend, but it could also mean paying 10x the fee and still having to wait a week or more anyway. To be reasonably sure of getting confirmed today you are probably looking at a fee of 50 sats/vbyte, which is almost $200. If it were me I would just wait.

IIRC the payouts were automatic, there wasn't a withdraw option.

Good point about Christmas, Chinese New Year it is then ;)

I'm in no particular hurry!

Watching https://core.jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#0,24h has become a new bad habit!

Perhaps tonight the transaction will confirm!

Unfortunately, the average mempool size rose higher since you've posted. If it's at least 2sat/vB, it would've been mined by now.
Wish you luck.

Looking at this https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/transaction/ecb4d354df52519538a47f930e5b715a097c07fa4863b06a2eaa74d253f50f58 I think I got close if priority is anything to go by... just going to sit tight and be patient I guess!

Not sure if I understood you correctly, but that shows that your tx is placed nearly at the end of the priority list. My guess is that it would probably get confirmed on the weekend if you're lucky and there's no spike on the mempool.

You're #19218 out of 20120 waiting transactions. I think your interpretation was the opposite.

Over the weekend I was 4000 ish of 5000, I was referring to the number of transactions dropping to 5k being close.

I get how it works :)

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/11/15/zkf6J.png

:( :(

And now the number of unconfirmed transactions has spiked again and is over 40,000... with the associated increase in fees. I hope you brought a change of clothes, it's going to be a long wait :P

Haha, well... I'll give it another weekend at least :)

You could abandon the transaction and create a new one with only some of the bigger inputs once it drops out of mempool.

Morning all!

So I'm still languishing in the mempool, with a lot of other low fee transactions by the looks of things.

Is the fact this link https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/transaction/ecb4d354df52519538a47f930e5b715a097c07fa4863b06a2eaa74d253f50f58 isn't working something to worry about?

Yeah, looks like we managed to clear about 9 MB of 1 sat/vbyte transactions, from around 33 MB to down to 24 MB, before the mempool started filling up again. With the ongoing price ridiculousness (just breached $28k!), looks like the mempool is starting to fill again. I suspect your transaction will drop before it is confirmed.

That link is working fine for me. What do you see when you click on it? I can also still see your transaction on a number of other block explorers, so it doesn't look like it's been dropped from any mempools yet.

No. It's 9 days old and other block explorers see it.
I've found it on chainflyer.bitflyer.jp and sochain.com
Also whoever wants can easily re-broadcast it.

Actually I've just re-checked and possibly that has already happened. First I didn't see the tx on blockchair and now it works.

Just an "oops" we couldn't find what you were looking for link.

I think it's time I do something about this transaction.

I hate a look at RBF in bitcoin core but as this transaction leaves my wallet empty it wont let me do that.

The abandon transaction option is greyed out as well.

So any advice on what to do and how to do it would be great!

You won't be able to use a standard RBF unless you have additional funds in your wallet you can use to bump the fee, and the abandon transaction button won't work until the transaction is dropped from the mempool. You have three options going forward.

1 - Transfer additional bitcoin in to your wallet so you can use a standard RBF.
2 - Wait for the transaction to drop from the mempool, abandon it, and then create a new one.
3 - Start Bitcoin Core using the option -zapwallettxes to remove the transaction, then create a new one spending all the same inputs, but with a smaller output and a higher fee. I would back up your wallet file before doing this.

Could you give me a bit more info on the third option please?

When you say smaller output you mean smaller because of the higher fees?
-zapwallettxes looks like a startup line parameter, will I need to resync bitcoin core after doing that?

Don't want to screw it up, but like to sort this!

If you are not in a hurry, keep waiting. Sooner or later will be either confirmed, either dropped.
With some luck the activity won't be so high these days.

---

Edit: o_e_l_e_o is right, because it's sent to Coinbase part CFNP does not apply, hence I've deleted that part of the post in order to not cause unnecessary confusion.

He said he was sending to Coinbase. If he means the exchange then CPFP is not an option. I've never used the Coinbase wallet, but I'd be surprised if it allows spending unconfirmed funds. CMIIW, though.

Yes. Since you are sending the entire contents of your wallet to another address, if you are going to replace that transaction using the same amount of bitcoin but using more of that bitcoin to pay a higher fee, then the final amount being sent to your Coinbase address will have to be smaller to compensate.

Yes. -zapwallettxes will delete all transaction data, and will then need to rescan the blockchain to update all your addresses and balances again. It will also delete but not restore your unconfirmed transaction, which will allow you to create a new transaction spending these inputs with a higher fee, which when broadcast, will replace your current unconfirmed transaction since it is flagged as opted in to RBF.

Hence why you should back up your wallet file first.

---

I forgot all your outputs are on the same address, in which case this suggestion from LoyceV might be easier if you are familiar with Electrum.

Only if you have a pruned node. If you have a ~350 GB blockchain on your disk, you're fine (but it will take a while).
Alternative: export your private key, import it into Electrum, and make the transaction from there. Electrum also allows you to manually control which inputs to use (Addresses tab, hold CTRL to select, use right-mouse to Spend from).

Think of it this way: the value went up a lot since you created this topic ;)

I tried to sweep into Electrum but it is saying "no inputs" is that because my balance in Bitcoin Core is zero?

Try import (create a new wallet, select "Import Bitcoin ~ private keys".

Aha!

That worked, sorry to be annoying, but what should I do next....

It's showing the unconfirmed transaction at the top and my balance as 0 :)

Right click the unconfirmed transaction and select Bump Fee. You should be able to see a dialog to see the fees for the replacement transaction. If you do this, the transaction will be replaced with a similar transaction with a lower output amount and a higher fee.

Got it, so what's a realistic fee to get this thing confirmed today (with luck) but not spend a fortune ;)

See Johoe's Bitcoin Mempool Stats (https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#0,24h): if you're lucky, 3 sat/byte is more than enough. If you're not lucky, 12 sat/byte should be enough:
My suggestion: make 2 transactions: use a low fee on the small inputs, and a higher fee on the larger inputs.

I think I'll try with 6.

So when I set that and click "ok" I get a confirmation screen

Transaction ID is unknown
And options along the bottom are Export / Save / Combine / Sign / Broadcast and Close

BUT broadcast is greyed out.

I'm going to disagree with Loyce here. The mempool is now filling up again, and 6 sats/vbyte is going to put you 5MB from the tip. There's a reasonable chance that that won't clear today, and if it doesn't, then it might not until next weekend. I'd probably be pushing up to 20 or 30 sats/vbyte if I wanted some certainty of confirming today.

You need to sign it first. Then you can broadcast it.

Went for 12 in the end, so fingers crossed! :)

You have to Sign first before you can broadcast the transaction. Remember to not tick the box in the Bump Fee dialog to make the transaction final. It should still be replaceable.

Got them! Thanks for all your help guys, much appreciated!

I said 12 if you're unlucky, not 6. Usually fees drop several times on a Sunday. If you want certainty, a much higher fee is indeed the way to go, but for a total of ~50 mBTC with 15 kB transaction size, your recommended fee would be almost 10% of the total amount.
I think 5 sat/byte (https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#0,24h) was just confirmed too.

Congrats :) The delay earned you a couple hundred bucks in increased value :)
What did you use in the end? Electrum?

Yes, Electrum in the end.  Glad to have got them out of Bitcoin Core and I have actually "cashed out"  Whilst I'm sure BTC will get much higher in 2021 the £1000 they equate too is well needed at the moment and considering when I got them all those years ago tidy profit!

Yeah, went for 12 as I wanted to be sure and to get it done!

Oh, and the added bonus, some HDD space back as I can uninstall core now :)

Don't forget:
So keep your private key.

Forkcoins?  What, huh, how do I get those?

Considering the total amount if quite low, I'd say just use Coinomi (on Android) to import your private keys on the BCH, BSV and BTG chain. That covers the main Forks.
Before you do this, you'll need to add Forkdust to your current address, so BCH/BSV/BCH-A don't move at the same time.
Coinomi doesn't support BCH-A yet, and it keeps telling me that my BCH isn't split yet (they're working on it) so moving them together might not be the worst. In that case all you need is some BSV-dust, then sweep the private keys on Coinomi for each Fork (starting with BSV in this case).
After doing this, never use this Bitcoin address again! Consider it compromised.