Why does electrum take an hour to make a transaction???

[jaystone777]

I'm just wondering if anyone knows the answer to this question. I use Electrum and Blockchain as my 2 primary wallets. Electrum often takes an hour or more to complete a transaction and sometimes it says payment sent but the payment was never actually sent and takes days to return to the wallet. Blockchain, on the other hand, is instantaneous and when it says the payment is sent it immediately shows up in my bitcoin exchange account and I can cash it out to my bank account within a few minutes. Why is there such a huge difference between Electrum and Blockchain?

[Quickseller]

Both of your issues are most likely related.

I am going to go out on a limb and say that the electrum wallet that you are spending from has an xpubkey with a very large number of transactions, and likely has a very large number of unspent inputs. When you create a transaction with electrum, it will need to (among other things), sign each input, and when it needs to sign thousands of inputs, this will take a lot of time. I believe it also needs to review (?) all of the unspent outputs to see what combination of unspent outputs would be most efficient.

What you are describing blockchain.info doing is not actually something that is possible with the bitcoin protocol. I would say that you most likely have a (nearly?) $10,000 unspent output contained in your wallet when you sent $10,000 to your exchange deposit address (you might have also send some of the penny transactions as well). It is not actually possible for a wallet to change the size of individual inputs without some intermediary transaction (and AFAIK, blockchain.info does not create any kind of intermediary transaction to consolidate inputs)

[jaystone777]

Thanks for the feedback. I'm still learning here, but I do know that blockchain sends it immediately to my exchange wallet. They seem to charge more but the transaction is fluid and flawless. I really like the fact that Electrum is kept on a bunch of servers all around the world and also a copy on my mainframe. That makes me feel better about things like EMP attacks and server failures. I do receive a lot of small donations which may result in the problem that I'm having. Thanks again for cluing me in.