FAQ: All About Unconfirmed 0 Confirmation Transaction Fee (READ before posting!)

[grue]

I have an unconfirmed transaction and/or it is confirming super slow. What should I do?Be patient and wait. The transaction should confirm within 5 days. If it does not, tell the sender to resend with a fee. Do not ship goods without at least 1 confirmation. Please do not ask for help; it will not speed up confirmations.


Blockchain.info says it should be confirmed by now, but it is still not confirmed!Blockchain.info's confirmation time is just a guess. Confirmation times may vary wildly, so do not be concerned when your confirmation time is long. Sit tight and your transaction will confirm.


How can I speed up confirmation in the future?Use a wallet with dynamic fees (most do nowadays) and use the recommended fee set by the wallet. For fastest confirmations, always set dynamic fee to be the highest estimate.


How does Bitcoin's fee policy work?Transaction fees are based on the size of the transaction. Sending to many recipients, or sending from a wallet that received "dust" transactions will increase transaction size. How much fee you pay matters as well; 0.001 btc/kb will confirm within the next block whereas 0.0001 may take several blocks. These policies are in place to prevent large blocks (bad for miners) and transaction spam (bad for everyone running a full node).


How do I resend a transaction?Bitcoin-qt will rebroadcast unconfirmed transactions every 30 minutes or so. As long as the sender has his client open, the transaction will be rebroadcast.


How do I resend a transaction with extra fee?For Bitcoin Core users:

• Right click the transaction and choose "Abandon Transaction"
• Send the coins again with a fee

Third party client users


How do I remove an unconfirmed transaction?If you do not want to see the unconfirmed transaction, you can remove the transaction from your wallet. Once the transaction gets confirmed, it will reappear in your wallet.

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[tom1]

This should be sticked

[jackjack]

This should be sticked

If it is, I suggest adding the double-spending method to "If you sent the transaction"
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=231309.0

If you sent the transaction:

• If you need the coins to arrive in a hurry, you can expedite the process by deleting the transaction from your wallet, waiting a couple of days, then resending the transaction with a fee.

Why waiting? Afaik it's not necessary but I may be wrong.

[grue]

If you sent the transaction:

• If you need the coins to arrive in a hurry, you can expedite the process by deleting the transaction from your wallet, waiting a couple of days, then resending the transaction with a fee.

Why waiting? Afaik it's not necessary but I may be wrong.

You need to wait a few days for the transaction to drop from the memory pool. If you don't wait, the current implementation will treat it as an double spend attempt.

[Maged]

If you have a recent backup of your wallet, it would be easier to go back to that than to use pywallet. Just don't delete your "broken" wallet until you're sure you have all of your funds.

[bernard75]

• Do nothing, it should confirm itself within a week.

A week? Seriously???

[grue]

• Do nothing, it should confirm itself within a week.

A week? Seriously???

Within a week. I stated this because confirmation time varies wildly. Don't want people getting upset their transaction didn't get confirmed within the average confirmation time. Worst case scenario IMO is a 0 fee transaction that normally would require a fee. Last time I sent such a transaction, it was confirmed overnight.

[HeroC]

Does it require more fees when more transactions are behind it? I used to use faucets a lot, and I just sent a transaction, and it has a bunch of faucet transactions. That makes the transaction bigger, which requires more fees, right?

[jackjack]

That makes the transaction bigger, which requires more fees, right?

Yes

[shbtc]

I have a large transaction that appears to have been abandoned by the network, no confirmations in 5 hours. I'm using Ubuntu 13.04 and when I try to get the dependencies I get these error messages:

E: Could not open lock file /var/lib/dpkg/lock - open (13: Permission denied)
E: Unable to lock the administration directory (/var/lib/dpkg/), are you root?

I've already used the sudo command.

I can't wait a week because the transaction is to a temporary deposit address to CampBX that expires in 1 day, 9 hours. Any ideas? Any other ways to remedy this?

[jackjack]

What dependencies are you talking about?
Could you post the tx you'd like to broadcast?

[shbtc]

What dependencies are you talking about?
Could you post the tx you'd like to broadcast?

Well bitcoin-qt just corrected itself. 20 confirmations.

Dependencies:

Debian-based Linux:
 aptitude install build-essential python-dev python-twisted python-bsddb3

[b!z]

Stupid question: does deleting the transaction remove it from the network and put the coins back into your address so they can be sent again?

[grue]

Stupid question: does deleting the transaction remove it from the network and put the coins back into your address so they can be sent again?

deleting the transaction does the following:

• prevents your client from rebroadcasting the transaction
• ...which causes nodes to "forget" the transaction ever existed (since unconfirmed transactions are not "remembered" after shutdown)
• ...which allows you to double spend the input to another address(since there won't be a conflicting transaction on the network)

[Datto]

I normally just delete the wallet and use my backup wallet !

[jackjack]

I normally just delete the wallet and use my backup wallet !

My reaction to this is your avatar

[danystatic]

• Do nothing, it should confirm itself within a week.

A week? Seriously???

Within a week. I stated this because confirmation time varies wildly. Don't want people getting upset their transaction didn't get confirmed within the average confirmation time. Worst case scenario IMO is a 0 fee transaction that normally would require a fee. Last time I sent such a transaction, it was confirmed overnight.

I'm actually experiencing the same issue.
I sent from Blockchain.info, normal send (typically it includes a fee) but actually it says 0 FEE
http://blockchain.info/fb/16abbkq

I am not asking for a warranty, but would it be someday processed?

Yes, I do think it could be Uncomfirmed for life

[Moebius327]

• Wait 48-72 hours so the network can "forget" the transaction (this step is very important!)

What happens if you skip step 2, double spending before the network forgot?

[deepceleron]

Notice: If you want a payment to go through in less than several hours, increase your Bitcoin client's optional/voluntary fee to something higher than 0.0001/kB for all transactions. Priority is given to higher fee transactions.

Some transactions sending large amounts of Bitcoin may qualify to be free, but you should add this additional fee in your Bitcoin's options, so that no transactions are sent without fee. The default additional fee is 0, which still allows some non-fee transactions to be created.

The Bitcoin network is very busy right now. There are several transactions a second being sent, and currently 6000 and 5MB of transactions are waiting for inclusion in the blockchain. Inclusion is what makes payments confirmed and trustable. If there were NO more transactions sent, clearing this backlog would take over an hour of maximum-size blocks.

Just the web page attempting to list unconfirmed transactions is about 2MB, and will make your browser crawl:
https://blockchain.info/unconfirmed-transactions


Also note: If you have already sent a payment with Bitcoin-Qt, the best thing to do is wait. Other wallets may make "bad" transactions, with less than the mandated minimum fee that will never confirm, but Bitcoin-Qt transactions will always confirm given time.

The first-post instructions for removing a transaction and re-sending a new one with fees apply only if the original transaction was created with a "bad" client, or if it was sent while attempting to bypass Bitcoin fee rules. Removing a transaction record from your client and re-sending another transaction will likely do you little good. The network won't soon "forget" your original transaction if it is properly constructed, will recognize a new transaction as attempting to double-spend the same money, and will discard the new transaction anyway.

[DeathAndTaxes]

• Wait 48-72 hours so the network can "forget" the transaction (this step is very important!)

What happens if you skip step 2, double spending before the network forgot?

Nodes which "know" of the first tx will drop the second tx as an invalid double spend.  It is very likely outside of some rare conditions that no miner will ever see the second tx or include it in a block.