Bitcoin Forum

I sent .1 BTC to a friend with a 0.001 Transaction Fee on 21 Feb 2017 (48 hours ago).

I never had a transaction confirmation take this long?  I looked on blockchain.info and it shows Zero confirmation on my address and then receivers address.

Is this something I should be concerned about, or just keep waiting?  Is there anything I can do.

Thanks

that is weird. 0.001 is a big fee and miners should confirm your transaction faster than other. But in your case, they refuse to add it in the block. The fee is very comfortable and it should be confirmed immediately. well, you have to wait, sir. Nothing you can do in this situation

The 0.001 fee doesn't mean a lot... How many inputs/outputs for the transaction? The fee is based on the transaction size (in bytes), the transaction size is based on the amount of inputs and outputs. In other words, a 0.001BTC fee might be overkill in case you only used 1 input to create 1 output, or insufficient in case you used 50 inputs to create 2 outputs.

Maybe you can post the tx id, in that case i can have a look what's wrong (hint: in 99% of the cases, it's an insufficient fee)

i am curious that the bitcoin on his wallet previously have a lot of small transaction coming.
so when he want to send them together in single transaction automatically required quite higher fee to unify the previous small transaction piece by piece.
i have experienced something similar like this , send 0.25 bitcoin with fee almost 0.005 and that is normal i think.

You really have cases where 1mBTC fee isn't much? Oo
How do you know how many inputs and outputs will be needed though? You can only know once you've launched the transaction no?

I'm going to tell a hypothetical story here...
A long time ago, user Bob came into contact with bitcoin. He downloaded the core wallet and started doing mindless jobs for BTC... Claiming from faucets, signature campaigns paying very low wages (because he was a jr. member), filling in questionaires, PPC sites, some a-ads on his blog,...

Since these jobs were incredibly small, each incoming payment was less than 0.001BTC (~$1 in today's money). This isn't to hard to imagine, since we all know that faucet claims are paying allmost nothing, signature campaigns for new users don't pay a lot either,... and so on.

Now, Bob really liked bitcoins, so he had over 2000 incoming transactions to the addresses managed by his wallet, totalling a nice 2 BTC.

Today, Bob learned that Dell accepts bitcoins, so he wants to use his hard-earned BTC (imagine how many years he had to click that claim button to make those 2 BTC) to buy a $2200 desktop pc (including screen, keyboard, mouse, s/h,...). Since preev.com tells him that his 2 BTC is worth ~$2300, he's pretty confident that the BTC in his wallet will suffice (he can add $100 in fees for a $2200 purchase, so he's sure he's covered).

now, let's do the math... $2200 =~ 1.876 BTC. Since each input has a value of 0.001BTC, he'll need 1876 inputs to create one 1.876 output (no change address tough, since all his inputs are so small there will be no change).

Let's calculate the transaction size:
The formula to estimate the size => in*147 + out*34 + 10 plus or minus 'in'* (for compressed addresses, standard P2PKH tx).

In our case, the size would be (1876*147) + (1*34) + 10 + 1876 = 277692 bytes (that's correct, this transaction would fill about 25% of a block, do realise this is only an estimation... The actual size might differ slightly).

We look up the current estimated fee to have a 95% chance to get our transaction into the next couple of blocks:
https://bitcoinfees.21.co/ => 180 satohsi's per byte at the time of writing.

277692 * 180 = 49984560 =~ 0.5 BTC

Oh Sh*t... 1.876 BTC (the cost of his new computer) + 0.5 BTC (the optimal fee) = 2.376 BTC... He doesn't have enough inputs to pay the fee  :-\

Now, if you read this logic, you should also understand that the fee would stay the same if i wanted to pay:

• 187.6BTC using 1876 x 0.1BTC inputs
• 18.76BTC using 1876 x 0.01BTC inputs
• 1.876BTC using 1876 x 0.001BTC inputs
• 0.1876BTC using 1876 x 0.0001BTC inputs
• 0.01876BTC using 1876 x 0.00001BTC inputs
• 0.001876BTC using 1876 x 0.000001BTC inputs

Each of these transactions should add a 0.5BTC fee if they want to have a good chance of getting into a block quickly.

And this story is exactly why i personally think it's wrong to make claims like "always add 0.001BTC fee and you'll be ok". A lot of people still think that a fee is something that can have a fixed value, but if you use a fixed value, you either overpay, or underpay... You're almost never going to pay the exact good amount.

Also, this story should show you that a lot of people are wrong when they think the fee is related to the amount of BTC that is transferred. In reality, the fee is only related to the size of the transaction, and this size is related to the amount of inputs and outputs (not the value).

It seems that there are a lot of unconfirmed transactions out there and maybe you are not the one who did paid .001 BTC for your transaction.
Why not try to use this to your transaction for confirming it immediately. https://www.viabtc.com/tools/txaccelerator/ this is now very popular here in forum, thanks to those spreadors.

it depend on the size really, 0.001 maybe seems big but if the size of his transaction was 0,700kb for example, would still require more than 100k, because now the average is 40k satoshi look at google, what he can do is using abandon transaction and send it again with proper fee, it worked for me in the past

A very normal problem with bitcoins network. The sure thing is that your transaction is still on queue and needs to be in line with those transactions that needs to be confirmed first. Just go and try this
That can make your transaction confirmed.

Upon waking up this AM, the transaction now has 2 confirmations.

All your replies were great, and thank you to everyone.