Bitcoin Forum

Ow boy had to make 2 urgent transfers this afternoon. So at 1pm CET (5 hours ago) I made 2 transfers from my blockchain wallet. I set fee to priority to be confirmed within 60 minutes. Now after 5 hours both transactions even do not have a single confirmation.... :-\

Can you tell us what wallet you're using, and what specific sat/byte fee it used? and also probably give us the transaction ID if you're fine with it. I really don't think I've had a single transaction since like mid 2018 that went unconfirmed in 5 hours, and I'm only mostly using 5sats/byte max.

problem solved since a couple minutes. both my transactions were processed.... finally.

Had this issue using blockchain.info/.com a number of times myself. Useless piece of shit, stopped using it now.

core removed a fee priority mechanism where the network would follow years ago

now everyone ends up paying the same 'estimate' for transactions they want accepted. and thats the foolish part. if everyone pays the same estimate, then no one gets priority.

EG 2000 seat train. fee's to get on th next train are a premium of 10cents.. 4000 people pay the extra 10cents.. not everyone gets on the next train... in 10 minutes another 4000 pay the 10cents extra.. the spare 2000 from first allotment are in no bettr position than those in second allotment. so out of 6000 waiting for second train. its again random selection out of the 6000.. not 2000 get priority due to first allotment

I find bitcoinfees.earn.com always grossly overestimates the reasonable fee. At time of writing this comment, the mempool is almost empty and the majority of 1 satoshi/byte transactions are confirming within the next block, and yet bitcoinfees.earn is suggesting paying a fee of 14 satoshis/byte. If you absolutely need guaranteed to be in the next block, then sure, but you can get a >90% chance of the next block and almost 100% within the next 3 or 4 with a much lower fee.

I prefer to use https://coinb.in/#fees. Even for newbies who don't have the knowledge to use the sliders, they can just read the "Sat/byte" output at the bottom of the blue box and adjust accordingly.

I still use 1 sat/B just fine. If you are truly desperate and your wallet has replace by fee, you can always increase the fee later (after the broadcast).

Just look at https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#1,2h and use a fee above or near the highest one you see in there:

https://i.ibb.co/pynYFSv/image.png
Here you can see anything above dark blue (right now) would proceed quickly, probably by the next block (10mins). So above 5 sat/B would be a true priority.

I don't trust what wallets UI present to end users "in the name of simplicity". And unfortunately the situation may change in the very next block. But as you see in the graph, even the lowest fees are processing within the hour. I guess you just bad luck, such as Jan 3 where people were withdrawing from exchanges and causing a little spike in the network. But you usually can tell the situation by looking at that graph.

Blockchain wallet, blockchain.com? That's why.
Even if it is a priority transaction, they still have the control on the actual sat/byte of fee in every transaction.
So in many cases, the estimated/pre-configured fee isn't enough or updated so it will not be accurately "prioritized" by the system.

In situations like this, you can't really tell if Bitcoin's current mempool is the problem or their service.
And who knows if there's "something" happening under the hood.

Blockchain is certainly not trustable for this kind of thing. I've read many issues like this one here in the forum, so no surprise here. Use another wallet like Electrum and don't forget to double check mempool stats. It will give you a better idea how much you should paid.


This is not actually a problem on Bitcoin though, you just set a fee that's lower than the standard so your transaction is not processed quickly by the network. (and you can blame Blockchain.com for this)

You are absolutely right regarding your statement about bitcoinfees.earn.com. It is always at least 10 times higher than https://www.coinb.in/#fees. I have never once seen bitcoinfees.earn.com suggest a lower transaction fee than 12 Sat/Byte.

Judging by your post history, I assume your urgent transfers had to do with trading, right? My next assumption would be that was the moment Bitcoin went up in price, right?
Based on those assumptions, there are 2 things to consider:
1. Recommended fees are an estimate based on past transactions, while the actual fee depends on future transactions.
2. If market conditions make you want to quickly transfer funds for trading, the same is true for many other traders. You'll need to outbid them on fees to get priority, which means you'll need to pay more than what your wallet recommends based on past transactions.