Bitcoin Forum

Using Electrum 4.0.2 I accidentally sent coins without a fee to another wallet of mine. Now that transaction is showing as Pending underneath the Send tab in the Outgoing Payments section. RBF is does not seem to be available as there is no transaction for this request showing in History and when I double click the date section where it says Pending, nothing happens. The coins are still sitting in my Electrum wallet and there are 0 transactions recorded on Blockchain.info so my question is this: if the transaction never gets confirmed and drops out of the mempool, will Pending change to something else, i.e. unconfirmed or unsuccessful, thereby allowing me to resent the transactions with the appropriate fees?

Also, do all transactions have to have a signature? What happens if they don't?

Many thanks in advance for your help.

Try right clicking and see if there are any options to bump fee. If it gets dropped from the mempool, the UTXO would be as if it was never spent.

If it really does have no fee at all, its quite likely that the propagation was terrible. You could consider removing the transaction and sending another one. It could work without RBF too.
Pretty much. There are special cases where it doesn't. An example is 3MaB7QVq3k4pQx3BhsvEADgzQonLSBwMdj. Its an example of anyone can spend. It is nonstandard as it doesn't require a signature.

Thank you. By removing the transaction, do you mean delete the Pending in the Outgoing Payments tab under Send? I fear this will cause a loss of funds.

it sounds like you've created a "payment request" not a transaction. it is created from your "receive" tab and it is seen there which is why there is nothing in your "History" tab. that is the only case i can think of that says "pending" and doesn't ask for "fee" since you aren't making a transaction.

when you right click it do you see an option saying "Save as BIP70 file"?

It also says "Pending" and never asks for a fee on 4.0.2 if you goto the "Send" tab and put in an Address and an amount and click the "Save" button...
https://talkimg.com/images/2023/11/15/zJNXG.png

Basically, the OP has simply started the transaction process, but no fee has been set and it hasn't been signed.


@jeangenie, If you don't want that transaction, you can simply right-click->"Delete" that "pending" transaction from the list on the "Send" tab... NO coins will be lost!

If you still wanted to send it, you could right-click->"Pay" that transaction (and you'd see the fee setting windows or the transaction preview window if you have "advanced preview" set in preferences)

Thank, HPC (and others) - I was able to edit one of the pending payments as you said, set the fee, sign and broadcast. The coins are showing in my receiving wallet with one confirmation and Electrum History finally shows the transaction, albeit unconfirmed but it is there! After two very frustrating days, this is a great relief  ;D

To answer your question:

Unconfirmed: means it has been broadcasted and exists on mempools, most nodes can see it but it wasn't confirmed yet.
Pending: means it only exists on your wallet and hasn't been broadcasted yet. The network doesn't know about the existance of this transaction.
No other node can see it.
Either the transaction hasn't been signed or signed but hasn't been broadcasted (saved locally).
Electrum 4.0.2 added too many features and some of them may be confusing for those who are used to 3.3.8 and am one of them   :)

Thank you, Khaled, that makes great sense! Yes, it is frustrating when software upgrades have too many new features to learn.

essentially the send and receive tabs don't tell you about transactions involving your wallet. you should only trust the history tab for that.