25 btc stuck - Transactions allways stuck, scared to sell btc now cause of this

[gazorpazorp]

OK so what is going on with the network??? been always using bitcoin and yes sometimes transactions would be slower than other but for the last month every transaction I have put out there has been purely stressing just staying there in limbo for at least 24 hours (Fees set to 0.0005btc/kb)

Right now I got 25 btc stuck since 27+ hours, it was a big transaction (33.295kb) but I was paying the standard recommended 0.0005btc/kb fee from my updated electrum wallet which annoyed me considerably just by its own considering it amounted to almost 20 GBP.
I know at one point hopefully sooner than later in the upcoming days it will have to be confirmed or will fall out from the mempool. I just want to know simply why this is happening if I was paying the standard recommended fee. What is it I am meant to do, put an exorbitant fee every time I want to transfer a considerable size of bitcoin under fears of it getting stuck?

I would use to meet LBC sellers in person and send them quantities similar to this from time to time in the past, when that was happening I was setting the 0.0002btc/kb fee that was standard at the time and it would get a first confirmation in under 4 minutes. But If I am to do that know what am I meant to do? both the seller and me will not be able to stay there waiting for 24 hours and the second we part from each other I will have to pray for that person to actually come back and pay me when the transaction eventually clears it as I can´t do anything about it.

Truth is I am very scared of selling bitcoins after this, and got me wondering about the whole integrity of the bitcoin protocol itself if its as unreliable to the rest of the people as its been doing with me....

Hopefully someone can shine some light on this to me.


Many thanks in advance for any replies!

[1714476861]

1714476861

[ProfMac]

Bitcoin is transitioning to the epoch where the block reward is small, and the block is at maximum size.  As bitcoin enters this epoch, the transaction fees become important for those transactions that are time sensitive.  This is part of the original design arc of bitcoin.  The transaction backlog has been fluctuating between 4,000 and 50,000 transactions during the past few weeks.  As is usual in the bitcoin world, the comments regarding this vary wildly in connection to reality and paranoia content.

You may wish to know the current backlog and fee recommendations when you submit a payment. As I write this, that recommendation is 160 satoshis / byte for inclusion in the next block.  That is the same as 0.00160000 BTC / kb.

The block explorer is showing about 2,000 transactions each block, and about 999 kb for each block, so the system itself is chugging along like a well oiled machine.  You are just stuck in traffic while the HOV lane moves past you.

If your user is sophisticated, they can construct a transaction to spend their output from the stuck transaction, and include a large enough fee to sweep both your transaction and theirs into an early confirmation.  Actually, anyone who has an output from the transaction can do this.  It is difficult to give more detailed commentary without a TxID to review.  They probably should not make their first attempt at this on a 25 BTC transaction.

[achow101]

The problem is that you are using a fixed fee rate and thinking that there is a standard fee rate that will always work. Unfortunately this is most definitely not the case. You cannot just set a fixed fee rate and expect it to work every time. The state of the network constantly changes and thus the recommended fee will as well.

In order to avoid this problem, you should use a wallet that supports dynamic fees. This means that the wallet will calculate the optimal fee rate based upon the fees of transactions that are confirmed. If you cannot do that or do not want to do that, then you should always change the fee rate that you are using. You can use a site like http://bitcoinfees.21.co/ to find out what the current optimal fee rate is and set that as your transaction's fee rate prior to sending the transaction.

[gazorpazorp]

Many thanks for your replies guys, useful website that one.

Ok so the transaction is still stuck, was going to give you thyet now when checking on blockchain it says:
Transaction rejected by our node. Reason: Transaction was previously accepted but has been pruned from our database.

So why isn´t the transaction cancelled and the coin back in my wallet, should I expect this to happen soon?

Well luckily its between my own wallets so not much to worry about it, but i never done a double spend and would rather not have to do it hopefully if its going to sort out eventually in the next few days...

[achow101]

Ok so the transaction is still stuck, was going to give you thyet now when checking on blockchain it says:
Transaction rejected by our node. Reason: Transaction was previously accepted but has been pruned from our database.

So why isn´t the transaction cancelled and the coin back in my wallet, should I expect this to happen soon?

It has not disappeared from your wallet because your wallet still remembers the transaction. Blockchain.info is not the actual blockchain is not some sort of authority regarding transactions; blockchain.info is just a service running a node on the Bitcoin network. You will somehow need to get your wallet to forget the transaction. Unfortunately I do not know how to do this in electrum.

[gazorpazorp]

I see, well eventually after like 6-7 days it completed.

This is driving me crazy though I can´t use bitcoin. I used the bitcoin fee chart provided.
I sent one transaction with a 0.0008 BTC/kb fee which got stuck for another 3-4 days (fee which amounted for 10% of the total amount transferred).

I then had to send bitcoin urgently because I needed to cash out to pay my rent yesterday, sent it with the f**** maximum fee electrum lets me put (0.001 BTC/kb), guess what, all day stuck; took 24 hours to get 2 confirmations and I am still waiting for the third one to be able to sell them with my rent that should of been payed yesterday a few hours after I made the transaction still unpayed.

Am I still missing something or is this what bitcoin is going to be like from now on -stupid and unusable?

[achow101]

You should use dynamic fees instead of setting a fixed fee rate. Use Electrum's dynamic fees, and if such an option is not available, use the latest version of Electrum. When you go to send, there should be a slider that lets you choose a fee rate. Always use the dynamic fees.

Additionally, you can enable Opt-In RBF which allows you to easily replace the transaction with one that pays a higher fee. Electrum supports this feature, go to Tools > Preferences and check "Enable Opt-in RBF". When you go to send Bitcoin, you can check the "Replaceable" option in the send tab so that if the transaction gets stuck, you can increase its fee.

[HI-TEC99]

*snip*

I then had to send bitcoin urgently because I needed to cash out to pay my rent yesterday, sent it with the f**** maximum fee electrum lets me put (0.001 BTC/kb), guess what, all day stuck; took 24 hours to get 2 confirmations and I am still waiting for the third one to be able to sell them with my rent that should of been payed yesterday a few hours after I made the transaction still unpayed.

Am I still missing something or is this what bitcoin is going to be like from now on -stupid and unusable?

There seems to be an electrum bug affecting a few people that limits the maximum dynamic fee to 0.001 BTC/KB. You can fix it by opening preferences and unchecking, then rechecking "use dynamic fees". After I did that the maximum dynamic fee in my wallet increased to 0.003 BTC/KB yesterday.

Two other people who posted in the thread quoted have also experienced that bug.

*snip*

As a test I freshly installed the latest portable wallet (version 2.7.18) in a new folder, then made sure only "use dynamic fees" was checked in the preferences as shown below.





The maximum fee shown on the dynamic fee slider was 0.001 BTC/KB as you can see below. Although I tried switching to manual server selection, and tested numerous different servers, the maximum fee remained 0.001 BTC/KB.






Finally I unchecked "use dynamic fees", then rechecked it again, and that fixed the problem. The maximum fee shown on the dynamic fee slider increased to 0.003 BTC/KB as you can see below.




Unchecking, then rechecking "use dynamic fees" fixes the problem.

[Proficient]

Generally the fees and the network in general are ridiculous right now until enough miners give support for SegWit for it to be implemented.  This seems like it'll take a long time as Bitmain has a monopoly on mining and the owner, Jihan Wu, is opposed to its implementation. 

As a temporary solution for, for lack of a better word, important transactions like yours, you could use a Transaction Accelerator.  These are essentially a small group of miners which take the transaction ID of your transaction and try to get it into the next block.  However, don't use these for all transactions as then they will become useless (because they would be attempting to prioritise all transactions.