Blockchain confirmations

[rkkm]

Hi,
Is there anyway to know, wheter a miner had included your unconfirmed transaction into the new block which he just started mining? I mean having knowledge that specified unconfirmed tx is now mined and will get first confirmation in a few minutes?

[Bttzed03]

You'll know whether your transaction is confirmed or added to to the mempool just by checking on blockchain explorers like blockchair https://blockchair.com/

[rkkm]

I know, but what i mean, is to know few minutes before first confirmation that this tx is just being mined

[Bttzed03]

I know, but what i mean, is to know few minutes before first confirmation that this tx is just being mined

Only the miners would know I believe.

You can estimate though if your transaction is nearing confirmation if you check the mempool size https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/ (see third table).

The current mempool looks like this:


Say for example you used 8+ sats/byte as fee, most likely your transaction will be added on the next block (4MB in 1 block). The mempool size changes quickly though. It's possible that others will send at a higher fee than yours. If they do, you'll probably have to wait longer.

[joniboini]

I usually combine mempool.space and Blockchair. Use Blockchair to find out what's the position of your tx on the mempool (something like 1000/12000), and then use the data from mempool.space to find out how many tx is included in the next 3 blocks (let's say next block there's around 2000s included tx). Then you can guess at which block is your tx included. It's also easy to take a look at the fee at each block. If your tx has lower fee than the lowest fee in the next block, it's safe to assume that you need to wait another block. It is not an exact number of course, just an estimation.

[o_e_l_e_o]

I know, but what i mean, is to know few minutes before first confirmation that this tx is just being mined

You misunderstand how mining works.

We don't know which miner is going to solve the next block as they are all competing to solve it first. Each miner will also be solving their own individually crafted block with their own selection of unconfirmed transactions in it. The transactions they select will be dependent on which transactions they have personally seen and which transactions pay the highest fee. There is no way to know which miners are including your transaction in their "potential" block, and there is no way to know which "potential" block will become the next actual block.

The best you can do is to pay a fee that places your transaction near the tip of the mempool. Paying a very high fee can make you reasonably certain that your transaction will be included in the next block, but as we don't know when the next block will arrive, that could be anywhere from 1 second to 1 hour or longer.

[OcTradism]

You'll know whether your transaction is confirmed or added to to the mempool just by checking on blockchain explorers like blockchair https://blockchair.com/

With blockchair.com explorer, you can check (check it with Tor browser to protect your privacy) the temporary priority of your unconfirmed transaction. The lower it is, the higher chance for it to get confirmation in next blocks.

Why I say it is a temporary priority only?

It is because the priority is changing over time, yours can be low at 1500/10000 (looks good) but there are more people add more unconfirmed transactions on the network in next few minutes and at fees are higher than yours, your transaction's priority will be decreased and will be covered by new higher fee unconfirmed transactions.

[o_e_l_e_o]

If the fee you have payed for transaction is high enough to compete with others you can be  100% assumed that all miners have already included it into the block they try to solve.

That's not quite accurate. You can never be 100% sure for a couple of reason.

First of all, you have to take in to account network propagation time. This is usually very fast, but there may be a couple of nodes or miners who take longer to receive your transaction depending on network conditions.

Secondly, and more importantly, you have to take in to account how often miners will update their candidate block. Since most miners mine in a pool, this is dependent on how often the pools craft a new candidate block and distributes it the miners. This could be anywhere up to every 30 or even 60 seconds. So for the first minute or two after your transaction has been broadcast, it still may not be included in the candidate blocks that some miners are trying to solve.

There are also fringe cases like double spends or two blocks sharing an equal height which can affect which miners are including your transaction.

[seoincorporation]

You'll know whether your transaction is confirmed or added to to the mempool just by checking on blockchain explorers like blockchair https://blockchair.com/

This is right, but users have to be careful, if an unconfirmed transaction is in the mempool that doesn't mean is a valid transaction for the blockchain, let me explain my self. Transactions can have a double spend, that means a user can spend again a transaction who is in the mempool but only one of them will confirm to be part of the blockchain. So, is a risked move to think a transactions on the mempool is valid transactions, and this is why all services ask for at least 1 confirmation.

[hatshepsut93]

There's no way of knowing it, because assembling a block is not a blockchain operation. It's done by a miner privately and there's no need to share it with anyone. Technically, miners could make an API for communicating this data, but what's the point? You would need to connect to all major pools with this API in order to more or less reliably know if your transaction might be mined in the next block or not.

If you are worried about your confirmations, you should learn how to pick the fee manually instead of relying on what wallets recommend.

[bL4nkcode]

[...]

Just create your own thread promoting that url not here.

I know, but what i mean, is to know few minutes before first confirmation that this tx is just being mined

There's no way you can know that info, its a competition between thousands of miners, and there's no data for what/who's miner is about to win, the recorded data is just the winner which always labeled in every mined block.

[mezzaluna]

Well, there should be fairly good websites to look for Blockchain confirmations. When I was learning about Blockchain, the website BLOCKCHAIR really helped me out since you can paste your Block on where you have existing transactions and just look at it. That was a really fun stage of learning because its an interaction that most new comers really want to see.

[pooya87]

There's no way you can know that info, its a competition between thousands of miners, and there's no data for what/who's miner is about to win, the recorded data is just the winner which always labeled in every mined block.

even though there are thousands of miners around the world, they are going into "groups" to share the work so each "group" ends up working on the same block and then share the reward. these "groups" are the mining pools and there are about 20 of them. so the competition is actually between these pools and the reward goes to the pool which then it spreads among the individual miners depending on how much work they contributed to.

[tranthidung]

even though there are thousands of miners around the world, they are going into "groups" to share the work so each "group" ends up working on the same block and then share the reward. these "groups" are the mining pools and there are about 20 of them. so the competition is actually between these pools and the reward goes to the pool which then it spreads among the individual miners depending on how much work they contributed to.

There are many mining pools throughout history of Bitcoin and the top-10 mining pools change each year. These are charts from 3/1/2009 to 9/5/2020.

Because of that, biggest pools have also found most of empty blocks on the network, 1.9% for AntPool and 1.1% for F2Pool in the same period above.

For more details at:

• Top-10 mining pools on bitcoin network over years (2009 - May 2020)
• BTC empty blocks (2009 - 5 May 2020)