Tx Fees & Confirmations

[mjc]

Lately I have been seeing a trend when I send money from Blockchain or CoinBase, the tx fees are like 0.0001 - 0.0005 and my TX takes hours, up to 23.5 hours to get the first confirmation.  The iOS Blockchain app is broke all together, it will not include a tx fee on bigger amounts like > $100.   So if the default (recommended) tx fees cannot get you a confirmation what will?  Are going to start having to see 0.005 TX fees? 

I have two right now with one with 0.0003 tx from Block chain and one from coinbase with 0.0002 fee that have not confirmed in over an hour.  As I'm writing this the coinbase one just confirmed.

There have been two blocks found.

I also have noticed an alarming trend. 


290529    32 minutes    990    12,120.23 BTC    GHash.IO    340.91
290528    51 minutes    1154    13,321.32 BTC    GHash.IO    340.99
290527    1 hour 21 minutes    995    11,982.17 BTC    GHash.IO    341.03
290526    1 hour 48 minutes    259    653.12 BTC    Discus Fish    95.76
290525    1 hour 53 minutes    253    2,543.48 BTC    BTC Guild    99.38


This is not one every 10 minutes.  I know we are getting over 144 blocks a day, but there seems to be frequent times where we go hours between blocks and 4 in a row like this?

So to wrap up, the seems to be a crack in the infrastructure.  We cannot rely on transactions getting included in blocks, a 0.0002 BTC Tx fee gets in before a 0.0003 tx fee, and the blocks are not being found at quick enough intervals to make payment processing effective.  What if i were standing in front of an ATM or cashier and it took 6 hours to get the first confirmation.  If I have to pay $5 to send $100, I might as well use my debit card.

[odolvlobo]

My experience has been that the default fee calculation by Blockchain.info frequently results in transactions with no fees that take hours to confirm. I feel like there must be a bug in their fee calculation, but I don't know for sure.

You can avoid this problem by changing the fee calculation setting to "generous". Note that the description says it applies a fee of 0.001 BTC, but it is actually much less.

BTW, the fee calculation is primarily based on the size of the transaction data and not the amount of the transaction. If you have received many small amounts of bitcoins (from faucets, for example), then you will need to pay a high fee to get your transaction confirmed because your transaction will be large.

[DannyHamilton]

I also have noticed an alarming trend. 

290529    32 minutes    990    12,120.23 BTC    GHash.IO    340.91
290528    51 minutes    1154    13,321.32 BTC    GHash.IO    340.99
290527    1 hour 21 minutes    995    11,982.17 BTC    GHash.IO    341.03
290526    1 hour 48 minutes    259    653.12 BTC    Discus Fish    95.76
290525    1 hour 53 minutes    253    2,543.48 BTC    BTC Guild    99.38

This is not one every 10 minutes.  I know we are getting over 144 blocks a day, but there seems to be frequent times where we go hours between blocks and 4 in a row like this?

This is not an alarming trend, and it is not new. This is the way bitcoin has always worked. There has never been any guarantee that blocks will occur every 10 minutes. The process results in a Poisson distribution.  As you pointed out, there are more than 144 blocks per day, so the average rate is still less than 10 minutes.

[Gladdy]

It does not matter how much fees you paid