Bitcoin Forum

I am a receiver in a transaction which has a 0.2mBTC fee about 40 minutes ago and have not had a single confirmation. On blockchain.info it says this:

Estimated Confirmation Time    Very Soon (High Priority)

Why is that?

because higher transaction fees are overrated
pay standard 0.001 BTC and u will get it in 1 hours, like here

or maybe you just did smth wrong

Standard fee is 0.1mBTC not 1mBTC

I'm receiving money not sending, will edit OP.

Just received one confirmation 58 minutes later, I'd like to understand why it took so long.

Your transaction was created soon after block 293944 was found (Apr 3, 10:21:04 GMT), right?

There is a gap of 55 minute between block 293944 and 293945.
When no block is found, your unconfirmed transaction won't confirm no matter how high the fee is.

Correct, I understand all that but I'm wondering why there was a 55min gap? Is that common. Just an outlier in the probability distribution of finding a nonce?

Happens once in a while. The 10 minute thing is average. That won't happen all the time.

Correct, if your priority is high enough then the time taken for a transaction to confirm will be wholly based upon the time needed to find a block - usually 10 minutes atm. This is because your transaction is included in the block and each block that it is included in is considered as 1 confirmation. Hence if a block isn't found then you'll never actually get a confirmation unfortunately.

EDIT: It is pure chance that it took so long. The difficulty is set such that it approximates 10 minutes, but as with anything based on chance there is some variance.

As bitcoininformation and Light explained, it is purely random.

It is like, you should get one "6" when rolling a fair dice 6 times. But you may get 3 consecutive "6"s, or get none in 20 rolls.  :)

Average wait time is just over 9min.

You can trust zero confirm transactions by the way if the fee is high enough. It is very difficult to scam you once the transaction is around waiting for confirmation.

So in the future, if there is a gap of 5-6 days between the blocks, how we will be able to do shopping using BTC? It'll be extremely difficult.

The chance for that to happen is very very low. The longest gap I have ever seen should be slightly more than 2 hours.

Lol whut? The average time is around 10 minutes and 1 hour blocks are already extremely rare. A few days is almost impossible. Hahaha.

i've sent BTC many hours ago and just get 1 confirmation after +100 minutes
(2014-04-03 12:08:09 +101 minutes)
Size    3136 (bytes)
Fees    0.0004 BTC

whether size affects the time a confirmation?

nope. it's just a random. there are a lot of transactions in btc network so you just have to wait.

Sometimes it's slow (I got one confirmed after about 60 mins and with 0.0005 BTC) I think this is because of the slow mining activity going on.

OK... but even a 2 hour gap can cause problems. Suppose some retail shop is accepting BTC along with CC. Will the accounts guy wait for 2 hours, to get the transaction confirmed?

No, the store will accept transactions without any confirmations as it is incredibly difficult and totally not worth the effort to double-spend transactions for typical store-payments.

Also, CC payments can be reversed months after the payment, so those confirmation times are orders of magnitude larger than with Bitcoin.