Bitcoin Forum

I'm finally ready to send my BTC from my Multibit wallet to my paper wallet but I have one lingering fear. I've read about people sending BTC to various destinations & the transaction seems to get stuck or is never confirmed. How likely is this to happen? What could cause this to happen?

If you
1.) pay the min fee (BTC0.0001 / KB)
2.) don't have some unconfirmed inputs in the tx
3.) don't have some dust output (<5430 satoshi)
4.) make sure your tx has been propagated through the network before closing your wallet

Your tx will be confirmed soon without any problem.

As long as you aren't using an old out-dated version of MultiBit, the wallet should prevent you from creating a transaction that has any of the first three issues listed.  Most people who have such problems have used other wallets or payment methods that don't have as many protections for creating transactions.

As for issue number 4, if you are concerned you can check the payment address, or the transactionID, at blockchain.info to see if it has propagated throughout the network yet.  As long as you have a connection to at least one peer, the transactions will typically propagate within a second or two.  If the transaction is visible at blockchain.info, then you can feel confident that the network knows about it.

It is not problem. You can remove the transaction that never propagated by doing a 'Tools |  Reset Reset Blockchain and Transactions'.

There are various reasons why a peer does not relay a transaction. In a rough order of frequency they are:

There are lots of tiny inputs (under 5432 satoshis) in your wallet and the transaction fires the anti-spam rules.
The fee is too small and the peer chooses not to relay it.
The transaction is a double spend. Doubles spends aren't relayed through the network.

Thanks for your replies everyone. I sent a tiny amount to my paper wallet an hour ago & it showed up as confirmed on Blockchain quite quickly. However, an hour later it still is showing as being confirmed in my Multibit wallet. Why is Multibit so slow?

Blockchain shows a transaction as confirmed as soon as it has 1 confirmation. Multibit doesn't consider the transaction to be fully confirmed until it has 6 confirmations. After the first confirmation occurs,  the rest of the confirmations average about 10 minutes each.

So once it has one confirmation, is it then certain to get the others?

Also I have now sent $0.20 to the paper wallet twice over & on each occasion, the amount debited from my Multibit wallet was $0.25. Just send another $0.10 & the amount debited was $0.15. Are these transaction charges not astronomically high, 25% & 50% respectively? Don't fancy losing 25 or 50% of a BTC when I send them :(

only if you put a low transaction fee..

What do you mean 'Only if I put a low transaction fee? Do I have a choice about how much transaction fee i pay? I have now entered 1BTC and it says the transaction fee will be $0.05, the same as if I was sending a tiny amount. That sounds better :)

Be careful because I have had problems in the past and I ended up loosing coins. Also to the person above isn't it amazing that a transaction few is only .05$ lol it's amazing

That hardly happens, just send it. remember to allow a fee of 0.0001

It's not certain, but extremely likely.  The more confirmations there are the less likely that the transaction will revert to an unconfirmed state.


The fee is based on the size of the transaction (in kilobytes) not on the value of the transaction. Most transactions are less than a kilobyte, and therefore typically incur a fee of 0.0001 bitcoins

Thanks again everyone. I'm actually surprised at how easy it is. I brought money out of my practice paper wallet to a Blockchain wallet & then from there back to my Multibit wallet. Presumably I could have done it by bypassing Blockchain & going to straight to Multibit. However, I haven't encountered change wallets anywhere which were my biggest worry.