How do I speed up confirmation?

[flix]

I have been testing bitcoin for a week now. It works fine.. but first confirmation can sometimes take hours.. Am I doing something wrong?

Does it go faster with more connections?

[Quip]

Set the optional transaction fee to something nonzero.

[flix]

I'll have to get more bitcoins to afford that 

Ok, I'll try, but how much does speed increase? 0.01 = 10 minutes? How does it work?

[theymos]

Ok, I'll try, but how much does speed increase? 0.01 = 10 minutes? How does it work?

A 0.01 fee per kB should almost always get your transaction into the next block (in ~10 minutes).

[rizzn]

To revive an old thread - is there any data or visualizations that clock relationship between transaction fee size and confirmation rate?

[Sukrim]

The factor you can influence is when a transaction first gets included in a block.

Confirmations after that are just the number of blocks that come after this one, so these will happen at ~6 blocks per hour.

You can agree for smaller amounts with someone else to accept the transaction already after 1-2 confirmations, since it would not be economical to double-spend (and attack the whole network) for such a small amount.

To get the first confirmation, even a very small fee of 1 bitcent is usually enough (if no fee would be required otherwise) to get your transaction included in one of the next blocks quite fast.

The data is not easy to gather, as transactions don't have a timestamp when they were created when being included in a block afaik.

[nefanon]

Ok, I'll try, but how much does speed increase? 0.01 = 10 minutes? How does it work?

A 0.01 fee per kB should almost always get your transaction into the next block (in ~10 minutes).

Does this mean a fee of greater than 0.01/kB wouldn't increase the 1st confirmation speed?

(Sorry for the old thread, I'm using Search instead of reposting asked questions)

[theymos]

Does this mean a fee of greater than 0.01/kB wouldn't increase the 1st confirmation speed?

In most cases, yes. If your fee is enough to get all miners to include your transaction, then there's no point in adding more.

The network increases the minimum fee automatically when there are many transactions queued. Nowadays the default minimum fee is lower, though, so 0.01/kB will usually be sufficient even when the network is being spammed.