Stuck BTC Transaction (Mycelium Mobile Wallet on Android)

[Matthaeus]

Greetings,

I am quite a fresh user of BTC, and it would appear that I have accidentally set an extremely low fee of 8 sat/B while transferring funds between two of my mobile wallets on separate devices.

Considering that two weeks have passed since the transaction was added to the mempool, I have decided it might be best to wait
until the transaction is deleted and then to restart it with a higher fee. However, it seems that I am beginning to exceed the time frame in which that is supposed to occur.

Could anyone please see if the available data indicates when the network should drop the transaction?

The transaction in question: 2940b2f50cfaa5768a81dc3ab780853e1be5c413bee09d29d7b8dcef97c4c159

(The transaction was sent from Mycelium Wallet on Android.)

Kind regards.

[Charles-Tim]

The thing is, there is no central mempool, every nodes with full blockchain that verify bitcoin trasactions have its own mempool, and these nodes communicate with other nodes and pass blocks mined and transactions already confirmed across for verification in which mempools are also updated. You transaction might have left some mempool, but that does not mean it is not still included in other mempools. Even, that is why there can be transactions that is already dropped and yet later confirmed after 14 days, the reason to rebroadcast exactly the same input that was dropped. In your case, the transaction has not being dropped by most mempool.

Which wallet did you send the transaction to? If you are able to spend unconfirmed transaction on the wallet, you can send to another address on your same wallet using input from the unconfirmed transaction. If high fee is used, the transactions will be confirmed earlier.

[Matthaeus]

The thing is, there is no central mempool, every nodes with full blockchain that verify bitcoin trasactions have its own mempool, and these nodes communicate with other nodes and pass blocks mined and transactions already confirmed across for verification in which mempools are also updated. You transaction might have left some mempool, but that does not mean it is not still included in other mempools. Even, that is why there can be transactions that is already dropped and yet later confirmed after 14 days, the reason to rebroadcast exactly the same input that was dropped. In your case, the transaction has not being dropped by most mempool.

Which wallet did you send the transaction to? If you are able to spend unconfirmed transaction on the wallet, you can send to another address on your same wallet using input from the unconfirmed transaction. If high fee is used, the transactions will be confirmed earlier.

Thank you for the swift response.

While yes, I am familiar with the decentralised nature of mempools to an extent, so I was simply referring to the collective multitude of them.

As for my destination wallet, it is Coinbase wallet for Android, and I do not have the ability to spend unconfirmed funds.

It is not a matter of utmost urgency, but I do not want to simply leave the funds in limbo indefinitely. As an experienced user, do you think I could expect the transaction to be dropped in the coming days or weeks, or should I seek another avenue to resolve the situation?

All the best.

[hosseinimr93]

As for my destination wallet, it is Coinbase wallet for Android, and I do not have the ability to spend unconfirmed funds.

If you are using the noncustodial coinbase wallet, you can use your recovery phrase to import your wallet into electrum and spend unconfirmed outputs.
Download electrum only from its official website.

In electrum, create a new wallet, select "standard wallet", then "I already have a seed" and enter your recovery phrase.
Click on "options", check "BIP39" and after that click on "Next".
In the "script type" window, select "Native segwit" if your addresses in coinbase wallet start with bc1, select "p2sh-segwit" if they start with 3 and select "legacy" if they start with 1.

After steps above, you should see the unconfirmed transaction in history tab.

You can right-click on your transaction and select "Child pays for parent" to spend the unconfirmed output to one of your own addresses. You can also go to send tab and spend the unconfirmed output to any address you want.

[Charles-Tim]

As an experienced user, do you think I could expect the transaction to be dropped in the coming days or weeks, or should I seek another avenue to resolve the situation?

I do not know much about this, but to my best of knowledge, mycelium wallet is a SPV wallet and have a central server, central servers are full nodes and also have there own mempool. If the transaction is dropped from such server mempool, you should be able to rebroadcast it. The server default days to drop unconfirmed transaction can be more than 14 days. Also, it can be from other mempools (not all mempools are 14 days by default to drop unconfirmed transactions), so I do not have any guarantee the time you will be able to rebroadcast the transaction than to check your wallet often until you will be able to see it and be able to rebroadcast it using high fee.

Also as to what hosseinimr93 commented, is the wallet coinbase.com or coinbase wallet app? If you have your 12 words seed phrase, that means it is noncustodial and you can use electrum to spend the unconfirmed transaction. But if it is coinbase.com, it is custodial and have no seed phrase given you, which means you will just have to wait.

[suzanne5223]

There's no way the transaction can be rebroadcast using a high fee since RBF was no enabled and the chance the OP has is to rebroadcast the transaction using bitaccelerate.com but it still wont give the transaction the chance to get confirmation.
With that been said. importation of the wallet in electrum either won't help and the best solution I believe to get the transaction confirmation is using the "Child Pays for Parent"
method.

Edit :  it look like the transaction is already been rebroadcasted.

[Charles-Tim]

There's no way the transaction can be rebroadcast using a high fee since RBF was no enabled and the chance the OP has is to rebroadcast the transaction using bitaccelerate.com but it still wont give the transaction the chance to get confirmation.
With that been said. importation of the wallet in electrum either won't help and the best solution I believe to get the transaction confirmation is using the "Child Pays for Parent"
method.

There are other accelerators, like ViaBTC can also acceleratate for free, but free acceleratators can not include such low fee transaction. Other means is the paid accelerators, but the fee that will be demanded for will make it impossible because the fee will be too high.

importation of the wallet in electrum either won't help and the best solution I believe to get the transaction confirmation is using the "Child Pays for Parent"

CPFP will work on electrum as the unconfirmed transaction can be spent on electrum, and this is only the best way remain that can be used.

[BitMaxz]

As for my destination wallet, it is Coinbase wallet for Android, and I do not have the ability to spend unconfirmed funds.

It is not a matter of utmost urgency, but I do not want to simply leave the funds in limbo indefinitely. As an experienced user, do you think I could expect the transaction to be dropped in the coming days or weeks, or should I seek another avenue to resolve the situation?

If it was from Mycelium wallet and destination is your Coinbase wallet why not try to double-spend?
Use the same inputs but this time increase the fee.

You can use this tool to make a new transaction with the same inputs https://coinb.in/#newTransaction
Just paste the transaction ID and edit the amount just to increase the transaction fee and then generated raw/hex just copy and paste it to your mycelium wallet or click the QR icon and scan it with your mycelium wallet.

[HCP]

Could anyone please see if the available data indicates when the network should drop the transaction?

The transaction in question: 2940b2f50cfaa5768a81dc3ab780853e1be5c413bee09d29d7b8dcef97c4c159

Blockchair recently received it
So did Blockcypher
Blockchain.com is showing "original" date of mid Feb

For the record it is in the mempool of my local node...

(The transaction was sent from Mycelium Wallet on Android.)

It's possible the wallet is rebroadcasting the transaction whenever you open Mycelium on your device. It seems your transaction was recently rebroadcast (within the last 12 hours). This means that some nodes might retain your transaction for 14 days from today.

If you want it to cancel out and for it to stop being rebroadcast... you may need to wipe the data for Mycelium (make sure you have a working backup first!!!), and then leave it closed for at least 2 weeks... If your transaction is not confirmed in the meantime, after your transaction disappears from all the major blockexplorers, you should be able to open Mycelium and restore your wallet from the 12 word recovery phrase.

The transaction should have "dropped" and you should see all the funds available in your wallet.

Not exactly an "ideal" solution, but if you can't or don't want to CPFP, then it's about all you can do to try and stop your transaction from being rebroadcast by the wallet, as there is no "abandon transaction"-type functionality in Mycelium.

[Matthaeus]

Thank you all for your suggestions!

I have now accessed my Coinbase wallet from Electrum and rerouted the transaction with what to me appears as a decently high fee and I am now waiting for confirmation.

https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/transaction/c98f7b0f7590287621f213d0cafb77e97951548cd1dc272e5b2b36467816c446

Could this procedure increase the estimated time necessary, other things being equal?

 

[HCP]

Yeah... the combined fee rate paid for both transactions works out to ~111 sats/vbyte... mempool.space is currently showing that as being effectively within the "next block" fee range (assuming there isn't a massive dump of super high fee transactions before the next block is found), so I would expect it to get a confirmation in the next block or 2.


It just missed the last block a couple of minutes ago by ~2 sats/vbyte


EDIT: OK... so I was wondering why it hadn't confirmed when blocks were confirming with fees under 100 sats/vbyte... then noted that one of the UTXOs for your "first" transaction is actually from an unconfirmed transaction

specifically this one: https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/transaction/2940b2f50cfaa5768a81dc3ab780853e1be5c413bee09d29d7b8dcef97c4c159#o=0

Unfortunately, this transaction is only paying 9 sats/vbyte... and is quite "large" from a data size perspective... As such the effective fee paid across all 3 of these transactions is:

(0.00004464 BTC + 0.00012460 BTC + 0.00019360 BTC) / (( 2025WU + 708WU + 437WU) / 4)
=> 36284 sats / (3170WU/4)
=> 36284 sats / 792.5 vbytes
=> ~45 sats / vbyte

Granted... it's better than 9 sats/byte... and it's currently within 4meg of the TIP... so maybe an hour or 2 if you're lucky.

[Matthaeus]

Yeah... the combined fee rate paid for both transactions works out to ~111 sats/vbyte... mempool.space is currently showing that as being effectively within the "next block" fee range (assuming there isn't a massive dump of super high fee transactions before the next block is found), so I would expect it to get a confirmation in the next block or 2.


It just missed the last block a couple of minutes ago by ~2 sats/vbyte
https://i.imgur.com/eLc5uXk.png

EDIT: OK... so I was wondering why it hadn't confirmed when blocks were confirming with fees under 100 sats/vbyte... then noted that one of the UTXOs for your "first" transaction is actually from an unconfirmed transaction

specifically this one: https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/transaction/2940b2f50cfaa5768a81dc3ab780853e1be5c413bee09d29d7b8dcef97c4c159#o=0

Unfortunately, this transaction is only paying 9 sats/vbyte... and is quite "large" from a data size perspective... As such the effective fee paid across all 3 of these transactions is:

(0.00004464 BTC + 0.00012460 BTC + 0.00019360 BTC) / (( 2025WU + 708WU + 437WU) / 4)
=> 36284 sats / (3170WU/4)
=> 36284 sats / 792.5 vbytes
=> ~45 sats / vbyte

Granted... it's better than 9 sats/byte... and it's currently within 4meg of the TIP... so maybe an hour or 2 if you're lucky.

Yes, that appears to be the reason for the apparent delay, but alas, I hope it will come through soon.

[HCP]

Yes, that appears to be the reason for the apparent delay, but alas, I hope it will come through soon.

Looks like it finally got confirmed... congrats. I guess the takeaway is be careful when spending unconfirmed inputs. If they have been sent with a super low fee... even a very high fee CPFP may not be enough to force it through.

[Matthaeus]

The issue has been resolved.

Thank you all for help, it is greatly appreciated.

All the best.