Bitcoin Forum

So I'm a new blockchain user and I received $5 from a friend, and I sent him like 0.000001 as a joke, and then I realized I sent it to myself and it's been at "unconfirmed transaction" for 24 hours now, what do I do..

Most likely you failed to include a transaction fee.  As such, the transaction will very likely not confirm.  Blockchain.info eventually stops broadcasting transactions that haven't confirmed.  Then they are dropped from peers' memory pools and the bitcoins show up in your blockchain.info wallet again so you can re-send them in the future if you like.

I'm not exactly certain how long blockchain.info waits before they give up on the transaction being confirmed.  Perhaps a few days?

Wait 7 days and you'll see the coins come back.

You wait. I'd also suggest learning to triple check amounts and wallet addresses you're sending money to. You don't want to accidentally send coins to a complete stranger, that won't come back no matter how long you wait.

I remember a year or two ago, back before there were so many goddamn scammers here, someone actually sent to a wrong address and got the coins back! Might have been Goat or Matthew... don't remember but it was probably one of the two.

But yeah, what he said  :P

Yeah, I've actually seen that happen a few times, but that's only if you accidentally send the money to someone who's a decent person. I've seen the opposite happen more times though. Was reading a negative feedback recently somewhere after they'd accidentally sent this guy 10btc or something and he refused to send it back and kept it, so be very careful where you send your money.

do you pay the transaction fee? if not, this transaction may be delayed,

Wallets by default should include a transaction fee, and for people that don't want to deal with this they must have an option to manually disable fees.

Bitcoin Core doesn't send anything without transaction fee, even if you set transaction fee to 0 they still require you to add minimum 0.0001 as fee.

Thats not true. Bitcoin Core is perfectly fine with sending your TX without a fee as long as the priority of the TX is high enough without fee.

I tried it for fun, and everything when I am trying to send coins without fee it tells me minimum required fee is 0.0001BTC

It won't let me send anything without that fee, even though I manually have set the fee to 0.

Take an input of >1 btc and wait 1-2 weeks after receiving it. Worked fine for me in the past, I think the input you spend is either to small or not old enough. Enable coin control to see more about the inputs before using them.

There is a general rule as "1 bitcoin-day".
If your input is 1 btc, you will need to wait for ~1 day to have a high enough priority for a ordinary transaction (1 input + 2 outputs).
If you input is 0.1 btc, you will need ~10 days.

I did not know there is rule like this. All my transactions proceeded  in a matter of minutes at most, always. I never waited for more like 5 minutes. Wierd.

I will definitely try that for testing purposes.

The coins were just a few days in my wallet when trying. Does it matter if the coins are freshly mined?

My post was made in response to shorena's post, and the "rule" refers to zero-fee transaction only.
For transaction with standard 0.0001 per KB fee, they most likely are confirmed in the next block after.

The coins should be mature (>100 blocks after coinbase) AFAIK.


Thanks for the reminder of the actual numbers. In case anyone wonders about it, here [1] is a more in debt explanation.

[1] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transaction_fees#Technical_info