A question about transactions

[Poker Player]

I've been holding for some years but I've only sent a couple of transactions before today, so sorry in advance if this question is too basic.

With the ATH today I decided to make a small purchase and sent the transaction using Ledger nano. I chose the standard fee as I wasn't in a hurry. As you may well know I could have chose higher fees for higher speed and lower fees as well.

I've sent it 7 hours ago and I see it has not even 1 confirmation yet. Is that normal?

I see in blockchain.com that transaction fees are 28.9 satoshy per byte.

I am wondering if this is normal or maybe because of the ATH people are spending more and the mempool is full so transactions get delayed.

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[stompix]

I've sent it 7 hours ago and I see it has not even 1 confirmation yet. Is that normal?

Bad timing, 8 hours ago, 40sat/b would have got you into the first block, 30 was a good average fee, but things have changed dramatically, so most likely unless you want to increase the fee you will probably have to wait till tomorrow morning (GMT) in the best case till the weekend, at 28sat/b yours is buried by 25M other transactions. Not normal on normal days, but this one is not a normal day

I am wondering if this is normal or maybe because of the ATH people are spending more and the mempool is full so transactions get delayed.

A huge increase always happens but won't last long, if the fees are getting too high people stop doing small transactions and thus using less block space and bringing overall fees down, the usual cycle.
PS
If you're in a hurry you can try Viabtc accelerator but I assume you would have done this already if it was urgent and mentioned it.

[hosseinimr93]

First of all, note that transaction are prioritized base on the fee you per vbyte not the fee per byte.  
Assuming all inputs of your transaction are legacy addresses and the fee per byte is equal to fee per vbyte, your transaction is now about 26 MB from the tip and currently there are more than 50,000 unconfirmed transactions with higher priority than yours.
According to the estimation made by mempool.space, even for getting the first confirmation in 42 blocks (about 7 hours), you need to pay 70 satoshi per vbyte.

As you stated that you are not in hurry, just wait. In the worst case, your transaction will be confirmed on weekends.

[Poker Player]

Well, after creating this thread and receiving the answers I locked it. I think it was a mistake, because before that I locked threads in other sections so that they did not become spam megathreads but thinking about it, that will not happen in this section, which is a serious one.

The thing is that yesterday, after waiting, seeing that the mempool was still full, and fearing that I would be refunded the amount of the transaction, I decided to use a transaction accelerator. I know that they have free and pay versions. I used the free version and next time I looked, after 2 or 3 hours, the transaction had been confirmed.

This raises a question for me. Why do the transaction accelerators work in the free version? I understand that if you pay more to speed up a transaction then it will be prioritized and confirmed, but I don't quite understand why simply putting my transaction ID and clicking without paying anything speeds up the transaction.

Can someone explain this to me?

[philipma1957]

Well, after creating this thread and receiving the answers I locked it. I think it was a mistake, because before that I locked threads in other sections so that they did not become spam megathreads but thinking about it, that will not happen in this section, which is a serious one.

The thing is that yesterday, after waiting, seeing that the mempool was still full, and fearing that I would be refunded the amount of the transaction, I decided to use a transaction accelerator. I know that they have free and pay versions. I used the free version and next time I looked, after 2 or 3 hours, the transaction had been confirmed.

This raises a question for me. Why do the transaction accelerators work in the free version? I understand that if you pay more to speed up a transaction then it will be prioritized and confirmed, but I don't quite understand why simply putting my transaction ID and clicking without paying anything speeds up the transaction.

Can someone explain this to me?

viabtc has a free one. they allow a few each and every hour. it is simply a courtesy to the network.

they white list a portion of space for them in the next block they hit.

they also will do a charged one which gets higher priority then the free ones.

the network does around 360k transactions a day divide by 144 it comes to 2200 per block

viabtc makes 6-10 blocks a day.  so that is 13200 to 22000 transactions a day.

if they let 50 x 24 = 1200 free a day. they look good. it will make some sales for paid.

if you are desperate you would pay 💰 to clear you tx id.

I am glad it cleared. btw I cleared four this week.
I paid about 25sats and then worked the free accelerator for hours on weds thurs and today.

I did todays in one try. but weds and thurs took five or six trys.

i have only paid for one tx id to clear around 30 usd to clear 2400 usd.

all other times i just kept trying the free one.

since i mine and have partners i do lots of moves.

so on sunday i will be moving .14 or maybe .16 coins spilt to four people

i will pay 25 sats for each transaction and then wait overnight. if they do not clear i will work the accelerator.

[HCP]

Firstly, most "Transaction Accelerators" are simply scams... especially the random website ones that say things like "we work with a number of mining pools" etc... and especially if they ask for a small fee to "accelerate" your transaction.

Most of the time, they don't actually do anything except take your money and then claim that it could take 24 hours for your transaction to be confirmed (which is usually quite likely for any transaction)... other times they'll just use the "free" services available that do actually work.

As for why free accelerators (like the ViaBTC one) actually work without a fee... well, essentially that is just a mining pool giving priority to your transaction, regardless of the fee that you've paid. Mining Pool operators are free to include any transactions they choose. The ones that offer accelerators simply override their automatic transaction selection algorithms and say "include all these 'accelerated' transactions first, then fill the block with high fee paying transactions as per normal". ViaBTC originally did it as a bit of good PR... they earned a name for themselves by trying to help people out.

Which accelerator did you use? and aside from the fact that your transaction finally got confirmed, what proof do you have that the accelerator actually did anything at all?

As far as I'm aware, the only free one that actually works with any level of consistency is ViaBTC, but that's hard to get one of the 100 free slots...

[philipma1957]

Firstly, most "Transaction Accelerators" are simply scams... especially the random website ones that say things like "we work with a number of mining pools" etc... and especially if they ask for a small fee to "accelerate" your transaction.

Most of the time, they don't actually do anything except take your money and then claim that it could take 24 hours for your transaction to be confirmed (which is usually quite likely for any transaction)... other times they'll just use the "free" services available that do actually work.

As for why free accelerators (like the ViaBTC one) actually work without a fee... well, essentially that is just a mining pool giving priority to your transaction, regardless of the fee that you've paid. Mining Pool operators are free to include any transactions they choose. The ones that offer accelerators simply override their automatic transaction selection algorithms and say "include all these 'accelerated' transactions first, then fill the block with high fee paying transactions as per normal". ViaBTC originally did it as a bit of good PR... they earned a name for themselves by trying to help people out.

Which accelerator did you use? and aside from the fact that your transaction finally got confirmed, what proof do you have that the accelerator actually did anything at all?

As far as I'm aware, the only free one that actually works with any level of consistency is ViaBTC, but that's hard to get one of the 100 free slots...

yeah it can be hard. real hard to get a slot.

there are people like me that are on tight margins and have to send transactions at certain times even if fees are high.

I try overnight and do nothing. Set the alarm at 4:45 am and if they did not clear I then work the accelerator.

[Poker Player]

Which accelerator did you use? and aside from the fact that your transaction finally got confirmed, what proof do you have that the accelerator actually did anything at all?

As far as I'm aware, the only free one that actually works with any level of consistency is ViaBTC, but that's hard to get one of the 100 free slots...

I was thinking that precisely. I tried the ViaBTC one but it said it could't accelerate or there was some kind of error, so I just googled "transaction accelerator free" or something similar and I tried one of the first ones. So, when I saw the confirmation I wondered if it was just a coincidence.

I see it is 47.3 sat/vB, low priority according to mempool current stats, so maybe the accelerator actually did something?

[ranochigo]

I was thinking that precisely. I tried the ViaBTC one but it said it could't accelerate or there was some kind of error, so I just googled "transaction accelerator free" or something similar and I tried one of the first ones. So, when I saw the confirmation I wondered if it was just a coincidence.

I see it is 47.3 sat/vB, low priority according to mempool current stats, so maybe the accelerator actually did something?

It's quite hard to tell whether the accelerator did something but generally the only working ones are from BTC.com and ViaBTC, both of which are paid and are related to mining pools. It might've been a stroke of luck, which block was your transaction included in?

The way I see it, the only thing you'll really sacrifice is the privacy when you use a free accelerator, assuming that the site doesn't contain any malicious content. I always signal RBF so I'll be able to increase the fee as needed.

[stompix]

I was thinking that precisely. I tried the ViaBTC one but it said it could't accelerate or there was some kind of error, so I just googled "transaction accelerator free" or something similar and I tried one of the first ones. So, when I saw the confirmation I wondered if it was just a coincidence.

Txs with 22 sat/b (picked one randomly) got confirmed in the last two hours, your was above that.
Another thing, check if your tx was not confirmed in a block mined by ViaBtc, their interface has a habit of giving errors and timing out while actually accepting the transactions.

LE:

However, what BTC Nitro does, it rebroadcast your transaction across a number of global Bitcoin ‘nodes’ which reduces the time you wait for miners to become aware of your transaction and start processing it. This is how our BTC accelerator works.

That's not an accelerator, it does nothing to actually confirm the transactions.
Second, the block was mined by bitdeer, but there are cheaper tx in it than yours, so it all went natural as it should.

[Poker Player]

Ok so I checked my history and the accelerator used was:

https://btcnitro.com/

Actually my ledger nano says it's not confirmed yet but it has 16 confirmations (0 before using the accelerator).

It was included in: 00000000000000000000b759570202ce47834fe7fded1854f93e1d32b9be15f9

[ranochigo]

Ok so I checked my history and the accelerator used was:

https://btcnitro.com/

Actually my ledger nano says it's not confirmed yet but it has 16 confirmations (0 before using the accelerator).

It was included in: 00000000000000000000b759570202ce47834fe7fded1854f93e1d32b9be15f9

Ah, the explanation you need is here[1]. It helps you to propagate your transaction better so more nodes are aware of it. Not very helpful to help you confirm your transactions, just helps to let more nodes know, if your transaction was propagated poorly or a long time ago. Which shouldn't be the case of your transaction.

Since it's mined 2 hours ago (combined with the fact that the previous block was mined ~5mins before), the mempool was getting progressively less congested which means your transaction was most likely paying enough fee to be mined. Blockchain.com does not display the fees in vbyte so I can't determine the exact fees but yeah, that's most likely the case.

[1] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5288307.0

[HCP]

LE:

However, what BTC Nitro does, it rebroadcast your transaction across a number of global Bitcoin ‘nodes’ which reduces the time you wait for miners to become aware of your transaction and start processing it. This is how our BTC accelerator works.

That's not an accelerator, it does nothing to actually confirm the transactions.

Yeah.. exactly!

It's a very misleading explanation by the website... they don't accelerate anything... nor does "rebroadcasting" have any real effect on when your transaction will be confirmed. Saying they do this to "accelerate" your transaction is simply bullshit.

My guess would be they're just trying to attract attention for ad revenue.

[khaled0111]

If you can see your transaction in any block explorer means that it has been broadcast successfully and most miners are well aware of its existence.
Bitcoin is a peer to peer system where nodes are connected to each other. The nodes which have your tansaction in their mempools will take care of rebroadcasting relaying it to their peers, so you don't have to use any other service to do it for you.

[ranochigo]

Bitcoin is a peer to peer system where nodes are connected to each other. The nodes which have your tansaction in their mempools will take care of rebroadcasting it to their peers, so you don't have to use any other service to do it for you.

Untrue. Reference client do not rebroadcast any transactions to their peers. Nodes tends to purge transactions after a specified amount of time of it being in their mempool. They will not attempt to rebroadcast the transaction. The responsibility of that lies with the client you're running.

It'll be useful to use a service which will rebroadcast it for you periodically if you want it to be confirmed and not dropped.

[khaled0111]

...

You're probably right. I think relaying is more appropriate here (edited my previous post, thank you).
However, even if the transaction gets dropped from the mempool you don't have to use any third party to rebroadcast it. You can simply use your wallet to do it.

[Poker Player]

Thaks for your replies, especially to @ranochigo for the late comments.

As you may have noticed, I have run out of merits to send, otherwise I would have given some more.

The transaction still appears unconfirmed on my ledger live but it has close to 100 confirmations.

Is it just because ledger is fucking shit? I'm quite pissed off with them.

[Rath_]

The transaction still appears unconfirmed on my ledger live but it has close to 100 confirmations.

Is it just because ledger is fucking shit? I'm quite pissed off with them.

Try clearing the cache. Go to the settings (top-right corner), select "Help" tab and press "Clear" button. If you are tired of Ledger Live then you can easily pair your device with Electrum. See this article.