How to Cancel or Stop BTc pending transaction

[Z390]

Is there any way to cancel a BTC transaction that's still pending on the blockchain? I've read about how to increase the transaction speed online before but not how to cancel or stop a transaction that's on pending before.

[1715328783]

1715328783

[OmegaStarScream]

Is the transaction RBF-enabled? and which wallet are you using? If Electrum, then yes you can do that by right-clicking the transaction and selecting "cancel". This will send the funds back to your own address.

[Charles-Tim]

It depends on the wallet that you are using. On most wallet, unconfirmed transaction can not replaced (cancelled, that you meant), but if you use wallet like Electrum, it is by default once you do not check the transaction as final.

After making transaction on wallet like Electrum, you can click on the unconfirmed transaction in the transaction history, where you will be able to do that.

[hatshepsut93]

The problem is that by default nodes are configured to not propagate transactions that spend the same input as a transaction that they already keep in their mempool. So you could try to cancel unconfirmed transaction by making a new one to your own address, but it's unlikely to reach miners, unless the first transaction is marked to be replaceable. What could work is submitting the new transaction directly to miners and hoping that your miner would be the one to find the next block. But this could only realistically work if miners run such services, otherwise nobody would do it manually for you.

[Despairo]

There's 2 way to do that, one is RBF enabled and the another one is double spend transaction (but it's need some requirement to do that). Here's the step if you want to do that using Electrum.

If you are using exchange or web wallet that doesn't have this feature, you don't have any way to do this. This is why it's better to hold your coins on hardware wallet and use electrum to make a transaction.

Using Electrum?
First this is for information only, not a way of illicit activity encouragement.

Try this:
1. Open your electrum wallet while online to sync and get the correct balance to make sure that all available inputs are valid.
2. Display 'coins' tab by clicking "View->Show Coins", then disable your network connection (you can do this online, but it's safer offline).
3. Enable "Use Replace-By-Fee" and "Edit fees manually" from "Tools->Preference->Fees tab".
4. Create the 1sat/byte transaction by specifying which input to use from the 'coins' tab, right click to an "output point(s)" with enough balance for your transaction and click "spend".
5. You'll be transferred to the 'send' tab, input the test recipient's address and amount and the fee rate '1',
6. Click "preview" then Click "Sign" (type your passphrase) It must be signed.
7. Now Click "Copy" and paste it on a text file, name that text file with something like "1sat/byte signed RAW tx".
8. Close the preview window and select 'yes' when prompted to 'not to save'.
.
9. Now repeat 4-7 using the same "output point(s)" but this time, set the fee to something higher and with different recipient address and paste on a different txt file with different name.
10. Last step is to broadcast the first 1sat/byte transaction (the copied Signed RAW transaction hex) to any blockexplorer like blockstream.info / blockcypher.com.

After a while, you can broadcast the high-fee transaction and it will replace the low-fee transaction if it wasn't mined yet.
It will be accepted or rejected depending on the node where you have broadcast the first, I've used blockstream.info for my test.

[hosseinimr93]

------------

There is no need to follow the guide provided by nc50lc in the post you quoted. At the time nc50lc made that post, "Cancel transaction" feature wasn't available in electrum.
That feature was added in version 4.0.4 and now you can easily right click on your unconfirmed transaction, select  "Cancel (double-spend)" and replace it with a new one spending the fund to your own address.

[aysg76]

There is no need to follow the guide provided by nc50lc in the post you quoted. At the time nc50lc made that post, "Cancel transaction" feature wasn't available in electrum.
That feature was added in version 4.0.4 and now you can easily right click on your unconfirmed transaction, select  "Cancel (double-spend)" and replace it with a new one spending the fund to your own address.

Yeah this feature was added in this latest version and you can easily cancel the transaction in Electrum wallet by spending more through RBF on your own address.



You have also explained the same here and now it's easy to cancel the transaction but it should be RBF enabled so that you can double spend it on your own address back.

The Electrum wallet incorporated a button to cancel unconfirmed Bitcoin transactions with RBF, a method that facilitates the replacement of a transaction by increasing the user’s commission. The update comes weeks after the wallet suffered a cyber-attack that has allowed the theft of 1,980 BTC through phishing since 2018.

The new version 4.0.4 of Electrum is available from October 15 on the wallet download site. The new feature makes it possible to cancel a Bitcoin transaction before it is confirmed, increasing the commission through the RBF (commission replacement) method to generate a “double-spend”.

You can follow the steps and you can cancel the transaction but it's for Electrum wallet only which we have suggested to you don't apply to all the wallets.

[khaled0111]

Technically there is no difference between how bump fee and Cancel (double-spend) work.
In both cases the wallet will create and broadcast a new transaction which consumes some or all of the unconfirmed wallets inputs. When nodes see the new transaction they will accept it and and drop the first one if it's flagged as rbf.
The only difference is that bump fee will increase the fee rate and keep the same outputs while Cancel will send all the coins back to one of your addresses.

[PX-Z]

I guess you ^(OP) should at least replied here on what platform did you use to transact or if ever you have control over that transaction you are saying. Because if you don't have then all the suggestions above ^{(RBF usually on electrum which i think you don't use by the type of your question)} cannot be executed.

[Findingnemo]

Is there any way to cancel a BTC transaction that's still pending on the blockchain? I've read about how to increase the transaction speed online before but not how to cancel or stop a transaction that's on pending before.

Basically you cannot stop a transaction once its broadcasted into the network but you can get back the funds to your own address or the desired address as mentioned above like using RBF or Double spend the transaction.

On some cases the transaction can cancel itself when the fee broadcasted is too low to get into the blocks for next two weeks the transaction will be cancelled on its own.