Bitcoin Forum

So I'm just back from meeting guy in a cafe (local Bitcoin meet-up) where he agreed to sell me some Bitcoin (a few €100 worth). Normal enough. Or so you'd think.

He withdrew from his Kraken account to my BTC address. We were sitting there waiting for over an hour until anything appeared on blockchain.info

It was quite scary. Luckily he was a nice guy (as am I). I paid him in full with zero confirmations cos I felt I knew him well talking for so long.

Basically, Kraken are delaying withdrawals for over an hour. Be very careful out there!!!

I think the preferred option for this sort of transaction is just the regular qt wallet or an online wallet. There is always a withdrawal slow time with any exchange.

Oh no...don't tell me what I fear might be happening...

I've got bitcoin-cli. He didn't.

I have always thought that kraken is one of the best exchanges, I just don't know why their volume is so low.


I hope they can be a reference exchange soon

I would tend to agree. I would trust them a lot more than the Chinese exchanges.

Maybe they're just having some technical blips with all the volume.

To be honest with the current volume of bitcoin being bought and sold I think 1 hour is pretty good...localbitcoins was having some trouble earlier.

The probably do not want to send you a transaction they would not accept as a deposit. In other words they will probably not send funds to any of their customers until 3 confirmations into an address that they control.

With that being said the network confirmation time is much higher then normal (eg the difficulty will likely decline the next time it adjusts) and there have been several 60+ minute periods where no blocks were found. This could have caused them to spend all their inputs and to have no unspent inputs that were confirmed by the network at the time

What?

Network confirmation time is totally different.

I'm talking about the time it took Kraken to release the funds off their exchange and onto the Bitcoin network.

the reason is probably because the miners are reduced

Read again. Nothing to do with miners.

This was KRAKEN delaying the transaction.

The button was clicked to send money to an address. NOTHING showed up on blockchain.info for over an hour. I only saw "0 confirmations" after about 70 or 80 minutes.

What the above users are saying OP is that they use current deposits to pay withdraws such as yours. The majority of their coins are in their cold wallet.

What the above meant was that the deposits rec'd probably didn't have 3 confirms yet and they didn't want to spend inputs they hadn't deemed as fully deposited (requiring 3 confirms).

Or simply this, the hot wallet might have run out and needed to be refilled. Any trustworthy exchange is not going to have an automatic restock of hot wallet from cold cause that risks easy hacking bankruptcy.

I know all this.

The fact remains that KRAKEN (nothing to do with the Bitcoin protocol - transaction times or confirmation times) took over an hour to release the Bitcoin onto the network.

I'm not talking a huge amount here - it was only a few €100.

I don't think the Kraken wants to send a customer a transaction that is dependent on unspent inputs. Since they only have a limited amount of inputs in their hot wallet, they will need to wait for these inputs to be confirmed by the network until they are able to send additional withdrawal requests