My Patience Is Running Out!

[Cinematics]

Not a single confirmation on a btc transfer for over 8hrs now. Set the fee at 0.0004btc which is considered fair. Is it network congestion or what?

[Cinematics]

Transaction ID:  69627b1dc36be399755648fc8d0946814b3e13e9c0c84a8dfba1c6f43ac293ab

[achow101]

The absolute fee on your transaction doesn't matter. What matters is the fee rate. The fee rate of your transaction is 107.8 sat/vByte which is okay. However your transaction depends on a transaction that pays a fee rate of 17.7 sat/vByte. This is very low for the current network conditions. Your transaction cannot confirm until this low fee transaction also confirms.

[Cinematics]

The absolute fee on your transaction doesn't matter. What matters is the fee rate. The fee rate of your transaction is 107.8 sat/vByte which is okay. However your transaction depends on a transaction that pays a fee rate of 17.7 sat/vByte. This is very low for the current network conditions. Your transaction cannot confirm until this low fee transaction also confirms.

This explains it better. Thanks! Should I increase the fee in my next transactions to avoid these kind of delays? Or how do I determine the fee rate before sending?

[achow101]

This explains it better. Thanks! Should I increase the fee in my next transactions to avoid these kind of delays? Or how do I determine the fee rate before sending?

What wallet software are you using?

You should be using a wallet that uses dynamic fee estimation. If it doesn't, you should consider switching to a different wallet software. If your wallet does support fee estimation, then you should use it.

[Cinematics]

This explains it better. Thanks! Should I increase the fee in my next transactions to avoid these kind of delays? Or how do I determine the fee rate before sending?

What wallet software are you using?

You should be using a wallet that uses dynamic fee estimation. If it doesn't, you should consider switching to a different wallet software. If your wallet does support fee estimation, then you should use it.

I find my wallet's fee estimation quite low, but there's an option to set the mining fee manually.

[joniboini]

I find my wallet's fee estimation quite low, but there's an option to set the mining fee manually.

Use something like mempool.space to improve your approximation. It shows the lowest and highest fee included in a block. Atm it's around 70 sats (lowest) for tx to be included in the next block, but it can change if the next 2-3 blocks are found quickly.

[o_e_l_e_o]

In addition to the suggestions above, if you are making a transaction with inputs which have not yet confirmed, then you need to pay a higher fee to cover both transactions.

In the transaction you posted above, you had a size of 371 vbytes with a fee of 40,000 sats, for a rate of 107.8 sats/vbyte. However, one of the inputs to that transaction was not yet confirmed. That transaction had a size of 226 vbytes with a fee of only 4,000 sats, for a rate of 17.7 sats/vbyte. Any miner that wanted to mine your high fee transaction would also have to mine your low fee transaction, and so both transactions can be considered as one for calculating fees. With a combined size of 597 vbytes and a combined fee of 44,000 sats, the combined fee rate worked out to 73.7 sats/vbyte.

So although the fee for your second transaction put you very close to the tip of the mempool, the combined fee put you a few megabytes away from the tip, which is why you had to wait for your transaction to be confirmed.

[HCP]

I find my wallet's fee estimation quite low, but there's an option to set the mining fee manually.

Use something like mempool.space to improve your approximation.

In addition, you can also use https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#0,24h to get some graphical presentations of the network "congestion"... by hovering over the right hand edge of the bottom graph, you can also get a rough idea of what a "good" fee rate might be...

If you aim around the 0.5MB mark, you'll "normally" get next block or 2... however there are caveats on that.

For instance, if the next block takes an hour to find, then you might find that your transaction has been pushed down the stack by the time the block is found, so you might have to wait some more. Also, this assumes that there aren't any prior unconfirmed transactions that your current transaction is relying on (such as in your case).

To prevent a similar situation in the future, it might also be worth seeing if there is a setting in your wallet that will prevent it from attempting to spend "unconfirmed coins".

[Bitcoin_Arena]

I have this all the time, when I withdraw money and the transaction takes more than half an hour, it starts to make me nervous.

There's no need to be nervous at all. The transaction eventually gets confirmed depending on the fee rate you applied for the transaction. The lower the fee rate, the higher are chances that I could take hours or even days to get confirmed.

Before sending out a transaction, you have to keep an eye on the optimal bitcoin network fee rate and the size of unconfirmed transactions in the mempool so that you are not in for surprises.
This thread has tools that can help you observe the mempool - List of Bitcoin Mempool Viewers for Reference

If you have worries about whether your transaction has been confirmed or not, Bitcoin block explorers can be helpful in viewing the state of your transaction
This thread has tools that can help you observe the state of your transaction - List of useful Bitcoin block explorers