Cancel a transaction

[Amstellodamois]

I tried to pay a transaction (with RBF activated) including too little fee. It wasn't confirmed in time and still isn't.

Now the seller won't accept it anymore so I really don't want the transaction to be confirmed. Ideally, I'd like to cancel it.

I've read I should try to double-spend it. Which raises questions:

• can I double-spend to myself? To the address of my coin or to any of my addresses?
• can I double-spend with no fee or would I risk the first transaction to be confirmed?

[hatshepsut93]

I tried to pay a transaction (with RBF activated) including too little fee. It wasn't confirmed in time and still isn't.

Now the seller won't accept it anymore so I really don't want the transaction to be confirmed. Ideally, I'd like to cancel it.

I've read I should try to double-spend it. Which raises questions:

• can I double-spend to myself? To the address of my coin or to any of my addresses?
• can I double-spend with no fee or would I risk the first transaction to be confirmed?

Yes, you can send a replacing transaction to one of your addresses. You don't have to and shouldn't send to the same address.
You can send a new transaction with no fee, but it would have near-zero chance to get included in a block, so the first transaction is much more likely to get confirmed.

To better manage your fees, you should monitor mempool at https://dedi.jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#1w and https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/
This will let you know what fees are most likely to get included in next blocks, and what fees are getting stuck.

If your fee was too low, it will "cancel" on its own after a few weeks when nodes will start evicting it.
If your fee was just a bit lower than currently accepted fees (150sat/byte for example), then there's a risk that it will get accepted later and you will have to ask your seller to return it back to you. In this case you should double spend that transaction to your own address.

[DannyHamilton]

can I double-spend to myself?

Yes.

To the address of my coin or to any of my addresses?

Yes.

can I double-spend with no fee

Yes, but you have 2 risks.

1.  The original transaction confirms, and the double-spend therefore becomes invalid.

2. Neither transaction confirms for a VERY long time.

or would I risk the first transaction to be confirmed?

This is a risk no matter what.

You have no control over which transaction will confirm.  The best you can do is provide a high enough transaction fee to create an incentive for miners to choose the second transaction instead of the first.  However, they can still confirm the first instead, if they choose to.  Once one of the two transactions confirms, the other transaction immediately becomes invalid.

If your fee was too low, it will "cancel" on its own after a few weeks when nodes will start evicting it.

Transactions never "cancel".  It is possible that most nodes and most miners will eventually forget about the unconfirmed transaction, but at any time any node that has ever seen the original transaction (including, but not limited to the original recipient) can re-broadcast it without your permission so long as it is still a valid transaction.

[Amstellodamois]

The transaction disappeared from my history so I thought I was safe, turns out I'm not.

Thanks for the clarification!

[Amstellodamois]

I had forgotten about it but the network hadn't: transaction was confirmed yesterday :-D

[hatshepsut93]

Transactions never "cancel".  It is possible that most nodes and most miners will eventually forget about the unconfirmed transaction, but at any time any node that has ever seen the original transaction (including, but not limited to the original recipient) can re-broadcast it without your permission so long as it is still a valid transaction.

You are right, I've recently encountered this myself. I've sent a transaction 6 weeks ago with very low fee, it was unconfirmed all the time and most block explorers and nodes have evicted it from their mempools, but a few days ago, when fees have dropped to 20sat/byte my transaction got included in a block! And I'm sure I haven't rebroadcasted it, because I wasn't opening that wallet since I've sent that transaction.

The reason why I've made that comment is because I had another encounter with low fee transactions - when my another low fee transaction (sent roughly at the same time as the previous mentioned one) started getting evicted, I was able to resend it with higher fee, even though it wasn't RBF. This means that double-spend transactions are able to propagate when the original transactions starts getting evicted.