Bitcoin Forum

Anyone else noticing transactions getting processed a lot slower than usual? I have been noticing it getting progressively worse over the past 2 weeks. Is this a problem because the last difficulty retarget actually decreased? what could be causing these long transaction confirmations? I mean seriously 3 hours not 1 confirmation, this is not right. And the source is a trusted source they send me coins all the time.

I got a payment about ~5 hours ago, after instantly seeing the TX appear on the blockchain, it now has 27 confirmations, i just love transacting in bitcoin its so easy and fast.

no problem here : https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty

Block Generation Time(?):    
1 block: 10.0 minutes
3 blocks: 30.1 minutes
6 blocks: 1.0 hours

There could be couple reasons, for example too low transaction fee or bad luck

I had to edit I think it may have been less than 3 hours, the time on Blockchain is not in the same zone as my wallet so Im not sure, my wallet is showing 3 hours blockchain is showing a little over an hour

Oh luck again, everything is about luck in bitcoins, LUCK IS BULLSHIT.

It seems the only thing certain in Bitcoin is there will always be theives, liars, scammers and hackers and just unethical people making more BTC than the ones trying to do this ethically and honestly.

seems you didn't pay a fee and your sending address has unconfirmed tx in it aswell.

it'll probably confirm eventually, but don't hold your breath...

Ahh i did not see the unconfirmed incoming transaction thank you that explains it now. Thats why i am waiting I dont like to send coins if I have unconfirmed incoming transactions :)

I only see one incoming transaction it has 26 confirmations? you see another one that has not been confirmed?

https://blockchain.info/tx/26950c5a316fd6be2e18bc47ebc898d2bf2ea154f954d0c2f9fe8d3370cae466

even without that transaction the wallet still has over 3 BTC in there so it should be ok I would think.

It is because the difficulty is decreasing while there has been a record number of transactions recently. This results in less supply of block space (as blocks are being found somewhat less often) and more demand for block space (higher transaction volume). This will result in the overall time to confirm transactions (measured in terms of number of blocks found since a TX was pushed to the network) to increase and the average TX fee required to get a transaction to confirm quickly to increase as well

Don't rely too much on the 10 minute block time.

Some times it can take more than 60 minutes for a block to be found.

it is really desperating, I think this is a problem that needs to be solved urgently, I can't understand why I have to wait more than an hour (at least) to have my bitcoins ready to use

It is definitely slow the past few days.
My transactions have not confirmed on mnay occasions for almost 40 minutes(the first 2 transactions). And its happening very often.
Doesn't happen all day through but more towards a time in the evening EST.

This might be the issue. I haven't made too many transaction in past week, only 2 actually with 20k Sat fee and they got confirmed very fast, with 1st confirm under 15 min.

This is not an urgent problem as such. The network is very secure so that more and more merchants and exchanges will be taking 0 confirmation or 1 confirmation transactions.

Last block was confirmed 59 minutes ago.  Is this related to OPs observation?

Probably. There were some big 'lags' like this in past days. Bad luck...
334486 (Main Chain)   2014-12-15 22:03:07
334487 (Main Chain)   2014-12-15 23:44:08
.
334489 (Main Chain)   2014-12-16 00:03:50
334490 (Main Chain)   2014-12-16 00:55:50

And there is the fact that OP is using a less then recommended fee (0.00001 btc), and a nonconfirmed input in his tx...

Looks to me like in your case, it was due to the fees issue where instead of the standard 10000 satoshi, it was only 1000. I did try once sending without a fee for a very small transaction and it got through eventually and that was almost like after half a day.

I haven't had any problems at all.  Is this just everyday normal transactions, is it from a certain website/faucet or anything like that.  My guess its not the blockchain that is being slow, its either the website processing the payment slow or something along those lines.

I've also had very slow transactions today. And it turned out that's something wrong at Poloniex, they actually announced that. https://twitter.com/Poloniex/status/544821638928138241
So if your transaction was to or from Polo, now you know why.

No problem here http://btc.blockr.io/block/list/ ... 3-4 block per hour, not too bad.  ;)

334586 (Main Chain)    2014-12-16 17:19:42    4 mins
334585 (Main Chain)    2014-12-16 17:15:52    8 mins
334584 (Main Chain)    2014-12-16 17:08:16    8 mins
334583 (Main Chain)    2014-12-16 17:00:36    8 mins
334582 (Main Chain)    2014-12-16 16:36:50    24 mins
334581 (Main Chain)    2014-12-16 16:25:43    11 mins
334580 (Main Chain)    2014-12-16 16:19:10    6 mins
334579 (Main Chain)    2014-12-16 15:37:01    48 mins
334578 (Main Chain)    2014-12-16 15:17:36    20 mins
334577 (Main Chain)    2014-12-16 15:08:42    9 mins
334576 (Main Chain)    2014-12-16 15:06:07    6 mins
334575 (Main Chain)    2014-12-16 15:00:23    minus 2 mins
334574 (Main Chain)    2014-12-16 15:02:15    3 mins
334573 (Main Chain)    2014-12-16 14:59:00    5 mins
334572 (Main Chain)    2014-12-16 14:54:42    5 mins
334571 (Main Chain)    2014-12-16 14:49:27    7 mins
334570 (Main Chain)    2014-12-16 14:42:31    2 mins
334569 (Main Chain)    2014-12-16 14:40:14    33 mins
334568 (Main Chain)    2014-12-16 14:07:08    2 mins
334567 (Main Chain)    2014-12-16 14:05:25    7 mins
334566 (Main Chain)    2014-12-16 13:58:46    

15 green = no celebration of quicker than average confirms
5 slower = crying from people that dont realise the 10 minutes is NOT a rule, but a average based on maths spanning over 2 weeks and then divided down
maths based on those 20 tx's is 10 and a half minutes-ish

Perfect, like ... bitcoin.  :)

Well the average block time really has been a lot less then 10 minutes so far this year because the difficulty has increased so much, this also resulted in much less of a backlog of unconfirmed transactions so many transactions were getting confirmed in one block, while now that we are seeing a more "normal" 10 minute block time, some transactions may take more blocks to get confirmed

Difficulty went up, or more miners switching off their equipment? I thought that the difficulty was decreasing which should have compensated for the dropping prices.

Evey time that the difficulty adjusts the average block time should move roughly halfway to 10 minutes from the previous average block time from the previous 2016 blocks. This assumes that additional miners had started mining on the network at an exactly even pace from the previous 2016 blocks (or miners were taken offline at an exactly even pace when the difficulty decreases)

seems to be quicker and quicker in my experience

sometimes transactions take a few hours but thats normal as block time is not fixed

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transaction_fees
Worth the read.

With Diff/Hash going down.  We could lose over half the network and still maintain these speeds.   Sometimes it just takes a while.  10 minutes is just the baseline time.

9 of 10 transactions are confirmed in 10-15 mins but a while ago one transaction took over 4 hours to be confirmed ???

They are as slow as usual for me. Pay more fee if you want faster.

is this related to the 1kb limit per block?

Yes, last two weeks new blocks were taking FOREVER.

Transactions are taking longer then usual because the difficulty has been slightly decreasing every two weeks when the rest of the year it has been going up by ~20% every two weeks. We also saw more periods then usual in which the time between blocks was significantly long.

The usual 0.1 mBTC fee will get it done in most cases. You cant force it faster than the time it takes to get the next block.

Nope, all good here. What tx fee are you paying? I usually pay 0.0001 and it goes within the usual timeframe for me.

Also, what client do you use.

Exactly! Stop crying OP and everyone else. You're starting to bother people with your whining.
Instead of celebrating the quickness of Bitcoin, all you do is complain.

You mean 1 MB? No it is not.

I am sending bitcoins from Android Bitcoin wallet with a low fee @0.00001  and confirmations never took longer than an hour.  Usually up to 30min.

From my point of view transactions are confirming faster than a year ago.
But this is my personal opinion.  According to stats confirmations might took a little bit longer than a month ago. But I don't feel it.

Kind regards.