I've seen older posts on this and my comment was deleted. My question is, isnt there a limit? Everyone seems to have a different answer but I am wondering if a transaction can be stuck in limbo forever?
I know of one which is stuck for 16 days so far and counting, till now I have not seen an older one but wondered if there are others out there?
With the recent surge in bitcoin activity I am wondering if this has now become a possibility. Are there any miners who can clarify on this.
No, there can not be such type of transactions that should take more than 6 months or a year depending on the amount and the fees. If a transactions is set with higher fees then the transactions will go much faster than the others. But if the fees are too low for a transaction, and its value is very higher than there can be some instances where the transaction may take months or years to complete. But still those kind of transactions can be put into a faster speed by some services that promise to accelerate the speed of the transactions. However, it's necessary to understand the fees before sending or receiving higher value transactions because those months, or years can be disasters.
Wow, that's terrible. So you are 100% sure and know of cases where it took years/months?
Don't bother asking him, he will never come back.
He made his 4 lines post that is a pile of garbage and now he is gone.
Transactions, until they are included in a block are kept in the mempool.
But what most newbies don't get is that there is not a single mempool.
Each node has it's own resources available and it can keep as many transactions in his mempool as long as it wants.
But most clients drop them after a few days or when the memory allocated gets close to the limit.
So yeah it can reach 10-20 days, but 6 months I doubt it.