Bitcoin Forum

I sent a payment 1 hour and 13 minutes ago to somebody. No confirmations so my purchase hasn't gone through. I received a payment earlier at 4:26PM eastern standard time and it's now 9:20PM and there are only 25 confirmations on it. Is something wrong with the network...? surely these numbers can't be normal.

Did you add on a fee?  How much?

I didn't, but it also didn't prompt me to give one.

That's probably why.  It will go through eventually but will take considerably longer. 

Are you using bitcoin-qt? Closing and reopening it will make it rebroadcast the transaction, helps sometimes.

Sometimes payments take 1-3 hours just wait.

Looking at block chain.info, it appears that sometimes there is a gap of an hour or more between blocks being generated. I don't understand why this happens, but I think that would delay all transactions and create a big backlog, because the blocks are what confirm the transactions.  Paying a bigger fee might get you to the head of the line, but it looks like a flaw in the system.

On 1/24, I had a transfer between codebase and Mt. Gox that took over 6 hours! This does not build trust in bitcoin as a currency.  Will this get worse as transaction volume grows?

The time between generated blocks is completely random.  It is designed to be approximately 10 minutes, but it is frequently more or less than that.  The transaction volume doesn't have much effect on time between blocks.