Bitcoin Forum

Hi guys,

I'm an idiot, didn't download the latest electrum client and have therefore sent a transaction with an extremely low fee so it is unsurprisingly still unconfirmed!

My hope at the moment is that it will drop out the mempool so I can resend with a higher fee; I've heard this will happen in 72 hours if not rebroadcast, is this correct?

This leads onto my second question: does electrum automatically rebroadcast my unconfirmed transaction? At this rate, it will never be confirmed so I'm hoping the answer is no!

Any help would be amazing, what would you all recommend be my best course of action? Currently approx 36 hours unconfirmed, but only sent with a fee of about 50sat/b

50 satoshis/byte isn't that bad. Submit your transaction tx to ViaBTC (https://www.viabtc.com/tools/txaccelerator/), and your transaction will be confirmed once they find a block (probably within the next 12 hours). Way easier than double spending/waiting for it to drop out of the mempool. In the future, I suggest you use bitcoinfees.21.co to estimate how much of a fee you should pay for a fast confirmation.

I don't believe Electrum rebroadcasts transactions automatically.

Hi Darkstar,

Thanks for your advice, I'll give ViaBTC a go.

Do you know if there is a fixed time that a tx will be 'forgotten' if it is still unconfirmed?

This is seriously frustrating, I do blame myself for not doing research on the latest optimal fees before sending the transaction through though.

The tool on ViaBTC is giving me the error message 'submissions beyond limit', so a lot of people are clearly using it!

I'd love a concise answer about how long a transaction stays in the mempool for, I've heard a standard of 72 hours but this is perhaps dependant on a few factors?

I'm also a newbie and wouldn't have the faintest clue how to do the double spend or child pays for parent methods; not sure the second one is even an option in my case. Guess I'll just wait and hope it either confirms or is forgotten!!

You have a few options here. You can wait and hope it confirms, wait for the transaction to be "forgotten" by the network, attempt a double spending transaction that pays a higher fee, or ask a miner to confirm it for you.

For the third option, you need to clear your Electrum wallet of all unconfirmed transactions. This can typically be done by simply making a new wallet which is restored from your wallet's seed. Go to File > New/Restore and simply restore your wallet using the seed words. That will create a new wallet which is exactly the same as the original but should only contain the confirmed transactions so you can send the Bitcoin again but with a higher transaction fee.

For the fourth option, you can contact the users Quickseller (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=pm;sa=send;u=358020) and macbook-air.[/url (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=pm;sa=send;u=16114)

Hi Achow,

Thanks for that, I'm going to try the double spend method right away and see what happens!

Failing that, I'll grovel to the miners haha.

Very helpful indeed, cheers :)

I tried creating a new Electrum wallet but it still shows the unconfirmed transaction :(

I did finally manage to get my transaction submitted on ViaBTC though so there may still be hope that this will be confirmed in the next 24 hours or so!

Hmm. Interesting. I haven't used Electrum in a while so I was going off of what I have heard other people say. Sorry about that.

No worries mate, all advice is very much appreciated. Very new to this bitcoin thing and this unconfirmed transaction has actually made me learn a huge amount about how it all works - silver linings and all that.

It confirmed!!!! Thanks for all your advice you lovely people!