very high transaction confirmation time, what's happening

[lee n. field]

I attempted to send .2 bitcoins from the local wallet that I have my Butterfly Labs Jalapeno proceeds accumulating, to another local wallet.  Transaction fee I set to .0001 (or .001, I forget at this instant which).

Both ends are showing the transaction as pending, since the transaction was made at noon yesterday, 22 hours ago. 

I've been watching the transaction on blockchain.info.  Queue position fluxuates a lot.  The lowest queue number I've seen it at is 270th, .

Blockchain.info is telling me the transaction size is 36452 bytes.

I've tried this transaction before a couple times, with the same result. 

What's going on?  Any thoughts as to why this won't go through.

[Rannasha]

Post the tx id so we can attempt to figure it out.

But from what you've posted, it seems that the transaction size is very large at 36 KB. The default fee is 0.0001 BTC per KB, so that would mean you need about 0.0037 BTC as fee.

How do you get such a huge transaction size? Have you received many small transactions (for example from P2Pool)?

[lee n. field]

https://blockchain.info/tx/9025e7bf094fc93aeabef9b6beed1d6a9afad8791d516e101822963d98970d9e

Many small transactions, yes.  The souce wallet was set up as a place for Easyminer to send what it produces.  This wallet has been receiving since Oct. 11, when I turned on the Jalapeno.  Typically, I don't know, 5 or 6 transactions a day.

So, perhaps when I get this wallet's contents transferred, I should start a new one for the little miner every month or so?

(The computer the Jalapeno is connected to is using Easyminer.  It's a netbook with a flaky screen, that's otherwise unused and unmonitored.)

[deepceleron]

You paid 0.0004 BTC for a 36452 byte transaction, which is below the minimum fee of 0.0001 per kB. This is why you don't use blockchain.info wallet for anything important, they can't seem to pay fees correctly. You say "local wallet", does that mean software on your computer sent this?

[lee n. field]

You say "local wallet", does that mean software on your computer sent this?

Yes, that is correct.

Any way to tell what the transaction size will be, when trying to do a transaction, so I don't run into this again?  The wallet software I'm using is the current version of Electrum.

[deepceleron]

I am surprised that Electrum doesn't correctly calculate the minimum fee in the way the reference client does, as it has been around quite a while. In fact, they removed the enforced (and usually incorrect) fee: https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/commit/67d2b940bceaa6e2d5111ad6df51d0b542c837e3, which is the wrong way to go if you don't want users to have a bad time.

I see that you re-spent the transaction and it was confirmed quickly with a 0.0080 fee. The minimum fee, so that the rest of the network doesn't just discard your transaction, would have been 0.0037 BTC, based on the size.

Use of Electrum also will almost double fees you need to spend, since deterministic wallets are created with uncompressed addresses, which makes spending your money take more data. Your address

1HxCHN8tVMUpqX1j3y9iR3bLgxKed6eB7k

is uncompressed, as I can see by it's 130 char hex pubkey:
046c6e5f74d644afb72679dbb27355817b5c15adf2859f6864d4e1e0133435cecf9d77828739e70 91f9ca7903f5b87cbb60fa36bd3b287c20c7c7398ec90404b12


The newest version was supposed to support BIP32, which would create compressed addresses for new wallets, but I can find no changelog docs supporting this:

electum 1.9 (the upcoming release) will use BIP32, and therefore compressed keys

I use Bitcoin-qt. It can send with the exact minimum fee required and does not let you send with less. Fees are calculated the way that relay nodes and miners calculate what is required, because they also run bitcoin.

[btcven]

The newest version was supposed to support BIP32, which would create compressed addresses for new wallets, but I can find no changelog docs supporting this:

electum 1.9 (the upcoming release) will use BIP32, and therefore compressed keys

I use Bitcoin-qt. It can send with the exact minimum fee required and does not let you send with less. Fees are calculated the way that relay nodes and miners calculate what is required, because they also run bitcoin.

BIP32 support was delayed to 2.0 release.