Time for a transaction to confirm, nowadays

[NotATether]

It is well known that blocks will scoop up on average 1vMB of transactions at the top of the mempool. If you are lucky and new transactions are being broadcast quite slowly, then a transaction with a depth <2vMB will also get confirmed fairly quickly. Ditto for <3vMB, except you'd need a lot of hashpower to come online at the same time and beat the average difficulty.

A deluge of transactions coming at the same time might push your transaction down to 5, 10, 20, 30, or even 50vMB assuming you've used a reasonable fee. In this case, it may appear that your transaction is "stuck" and is not moving higher up the mempool after a couple of hours. Assuming you don't want to RBF, your best bet is to wait until the next day and check the mempool again to see by how much it changed, because miners tend to process transactions faster at midnight. Or maybe there are just less transactions being created during that time. I don't know the reason.

For instance, today the fees went down from 260 sats/vB yesterday to 180 sats/vB. Although your transaction might still have the same depth, because many other people have created a transaction with the same fee as you, and now everyone is stuck around that depth.

Some people might be tempted to use an out-of-band transaction accelerator. That might work, but there is a problem with this: Everyone's using it all at once, that available spots are depleted merely seconds after new ones are made. The solution to this problem is to just wait it out, as fees cannot stay like this forever, and unconfirmed transactions will usually be evicted after 2 weeks anyway.

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[Catenaccio]

I use this https://whatthefee.io/ to quickly look at Bitcoin transaction fee.

It is very reddish now and I know it is not good for making a Bitcoin transaction and get quick confirmation.

I will wait for the table to turn green and look more details of mempools with
https://mempool.space/
https://mempool.jhoenicke.de/#BTC,24h,weigh
thttps://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#BTC%20(default%20mempool),24h,weight

[Telegram Bot] Bitcoin Fees - fees and tx tracker. This bot @BitcoinFeesAlert_bot is helpful for quick and easy checking, notification with Telegram.

[franky1]

It is well known that blocks will scoop up on average 1vMB of transactions at the top of the mempool. If you are lucky and new transactions are being broadcast quite slowly, then a transaction with a depth <2vMB will also get confirmed fairly quickly. Ditto for <3vMB, except you'd need a lot of hashpower to come online at the same time and beat the average difficulty.

transaction counts have nothing to do with hashrate

Some people might be tempted to use an out-of-band transaction accelerator. That might work, but there is a problem with this: Everyone's using it all at once, that available spots are depleted merely seconds after new ones are made. The solution to this problem is to just wait it out, as fees cannot stay like this forever, and unconfirmed transactions will usually be evicted after 2 weeks anyway

yep thats exactly the problem
when people use accelerators, their TX is not relayed the regular way to then be part of a fee estimate. instead it creates a cultural classification of first class citizens use accelerators thus pay less.. but a sub class of regular network relays with the same fee but not getting in a block at the same time. causing regular network broadcasters to pay more than their accelerator equivalents

[NewRanger]

Delays where many transactions have not been confirmed. My assumption seems to be that the miners want a compromise, Bitcoin is truly decentralized.

[adaseb]

The last 24 hours and prior have been brutal. If you were patient and used a fee of 175sat/byte then you might of got a block confirmed but it’s expensive and very long. If you needed it filled right away depending on the time you might of had to pay up to 500sat/byte. Even using a large fee of 250sat/byte would take a few hours. It’s getting pretty crazy out there.

And those transactions accelerators are all quickly filled up. Seconds after the hour starts. A week ago you could of easily got a few blocks in but now it seems impossible. I think with the Christmas break maybe we will see lower fees.

[NotATether]

It is well known that blocks will scoop up on average 1vMB of transactions at the top of the mempool. If you are lucky and new transactions are being broadcast quite slowly, then a transaction with a depth <2vMB will also get confirmed fairly quickly. Ditto for <3vMB, except you'd need a lot of hashpower to come online at the same time and beat the average difficulty.

transaction counts have nothing to do with hashrate

I meant, if there are more miners, there is a slight chance increase that two blocks are mined in rapid succession, which can happen if the global hashrate over-performs the mining difficulty on average.

Of course such blocks average out so the next block will probably arrive in 20 minutes, but it's a useful quirk to know if your tx is slightly above the 1vMB mark.

[Natsuu]

Waiting for a fee market adjustment or using an out-of-band accelerator cautiously are reasonable strategies to deal with transaction congestion. Patience often pays off, right? Bitcoiners know that.
In this network, it's essential to monitor fee dynamics and adapt your strategy accordingly. While accelerators can provide a quick fix, their effectiveness varies due to high demand and transaction eviction after two weeks ensures that unconfirmed transactions don't linger indefinitely. It's a dynamic ecosystem where timing and fee adjustments play pivotal roles in transaction success. We should do better.

[franky1]

Waiting for a fee market adjustment or using an out-of-band accelerator cautiously are reasonable strategies to deal with transaction congestion. Patience often pays off, right? Bitcoiners know that.
In this network, it's essential to monitor fee dynamics and adapt your strategy accordingly. While accelerators can provide a quick fix, their effectiveness varies due to high demand and transaction eviction after two weeks ensures that unconfirmed transactions don't linger indefinitely. It's a dynamic ecosystem where timing and fee adjustments play pivotal roles in transaction success. We should do better.

core nodes estimate fee's by looking at mempools and look at how long a certain fee range takes from first adding to mempoll to being confirmed

HOWEVER
when using accelerators. many junk and validation bypass transactions can get added to a block sooner, paying less in fee's. thus messing up the dynamics

because although blocks show a fee average of lowering at times.. the core node estimator is showing many many transactions of higher fee's waiting even longer.. thus making the estimator inaccurate, causing people to RBF and causing the numbers to increase higher whilst still delayed

as for "being patient"
january 22nd fee's $1.16 "just be patient, they will come down"
march 22nd fee's $3.36 "just be patient, they will come down"
may 22nd fee's $3.81 "just be patient, they will come down"
july 22nd fee's $4.75 "just be patient, they will come down"
sept 22nd fee's $2.77 "just be patient, they will come down"
november 22nd fee's $10.50 "just be patient, they will come down"
december 22nd fee's $30.70 "just be patient, they will come down"

you do realise bitcoin is code, and not code self created by AI, nor mythical nameless gods.. but instead by core devs..
the core devs can use code to create better utility. but so far are too deeply entrenched in sponsorship deals to make bitcoin an annoyance so that people hand btc to companies and leave people playing in cex and custodial offchain systems..

but yea just be patient, AI /gods will save us ( <- sarcasm)


2017 fees went over $0.20 :- "just be patient "the solution" will save us
2019 fees went over $0.30 - $6 :- "just be patient "the solution" will save us
2021 fees went over $1 - $30 :- "just be patient "the solution" will save us
2023 fees went over $1.5 - $38 :- "just be patient "the solution" will save us

[EarnOnVictor]

The whole situation in the mempool is so pathetic now and I don't think a solution will soon happen. If anything will happen at all, it will possibly be around February or late January which makes it so worrisome. The size is increasing most times, and so is the fee. My fear is that won't it still double the present fees when the price of Bitcoin actually doubles? I think we should prepare for the worst over time.

Also for the waiting, I think it is easy for those who are not depending on the Bitcoin transactions sent. We send our Bitcoins for a reason(s), it is not everyone who will have the nerve to wait for transactions to be completed in a week, a month or more. This happened to me around July and I know the effect on financial plans.

Fine, I wasn't so dependent on that money sent then but I had a very good investment plan for it. Can you imagine missing that plan just because of the congestion? To make matters worse, I couldn't accelerate it with ViaBTC because the condition of the fee didn't meet the minimum requirement as the congestion just started hours before I made the transaction, so I never knew. But for these big guys, I am sure that waiting will not be an issue, but still, it is disheartening that fiats will never hook your money like this, and the same goes for almost all other coins and tokens. It is shameful that Bitcoin which was supposed to be the role model is the one holding people's money.

There is no way it can exonerate itself from this, no reasonable justification here. A lasting solution must be found.

[franky1]

Fine, I wasn't so dependent on that money sent then but I had a very good investment plan for it. Can you imagine missing that plan just because of the congestion?

but the new game is sponsored
the rules of the game are to get people to lock funds up with middle men and spend through them to ultimately give them over your value. and make it expensive/difficult for you to exit.. thus you end up staying locked until you spent your value and exit without value to your name

[pinggoki]

So what you're saying is that the solutions like accelerators are useless because everyone's using accelerators and so it ends with them not having any effects, kind of like if everyone's a businessman then there's no customer/consumers? I guess that's probably the best option, wait it out and let the others do the other stuff, another question, what would happen if I'm the only one that's waiting or there's only a few of us waiting because the other transactions have been accelerated and now they're congested there, will the transaction get faster?

[Zaguru12]

Assuming you don't want to RBF, your best bet is to wait until the next day and check the mempool again to see by how much it changed, because miners tend to process transactions faster at midnight. Or maybe there are just less transactions being created during that time. I don't know the reason.

My best bet is many people tend to make less transactions at that time. Although there is variation of time zone but most traders tend to work with the UTC time and that’s why from 01:00 UTC to around 06:00 UTC we usually experience the slight reduction of mempool congestion and as such tends to reduce the fee rate. This is also one-of the reasons for weekends having less fee rate compare to weekdays, most markets like forex in the US are close. Although not related to cryptocurrency trading but some traders have also apply this analogy to it too.

For instance, today the fees went down from 260 sats/vB yesterday to 180 sats/vB. Although your transaction might still have the same depth, because many other people have created a transaction with the same fee as you, and now everyone is stuck around that depth.

People tend to make round figures when picking the transaction fees or fee rate and since the miners pick transactions base on fee rate or set up their mempool arrangement of transactions base on fee rate yours might be having same fee rate but will be down. The best thing to do is to not use a round figure but add some decimals like 120.2 sats, this makes your fee slightly higher than those in that 120sat group.

Some people might be tempted to use an out-of-band transaction accelerator. That might work, but there is a problem with this: Everyone's using it all at once, that available spots are depleted merely seconds after new ones are made. The solution to this problem is to just wait it out, as fees cannot stay like this forever, and unconfirmed transactions will usually be evicted after 2 weeks anyway.

When I read of this acceleration free space been used up easily I just thought of what is currently happening with Viabtc free acceleration service. In the space of 1 minutes the 100 free acceleration is easily filled up not like when the pool is less congested and at least for 2 hours same 100 wouldn’t be free.

The default time for fee to drop is that 2weeks but it seems to vary because some wallets have an inbuilt rebroadcasting feature that continuously rebroadcast the transaction, and also each node picks the transaction at different time (Although not much difference) and also the size of each nodes mempool is different and larger than each other, as such some might still be having it beyond that time and that means it will not completely drop to the wallet. The best thing to do is when you feel like the fee rate is below the purging fee, one should just try to broadcast the transaction again with another higher fee rate  by changing the servers until the one gets the server that doesn’t have the transaction again

[franky1]

and since the miners pick transactions

miners do not pick transactions
POOL managers do

an asic does not have a mempool
an asic does not contain node software

i have no clue where these idiots are getting their ideas from that miners are selecting transactions and need fee's
miners were not in poverty when the bitcoin market was $17k
miners were not in poverty when the bitcoin market was $34k
miners were not in poverty when the bitcoin market was $44k

miners are not to blame nor the reason

the real culprits are the devs that opened the exploit
the real culprits are the devs that refuse to fix the exploit
POOLs are taking advantage of it

POOLS just use API commands to bitcoin core. so if core says junk belongs in mempool unverified.. its ultimately cores fault for getting un-validated junk into mempool (the exploit of "isvalid" without checks)

ultimately the exploit leads back to core devs by pretending they are not developers this year and staying away from fixing it

[Oshosondy]

So what you're saying is that the solutions like accelerators are useless because everyone's using accelerators and so it ends with them not having any effects

Accelerators are useful, but the fee paid to miners are too much. If more people use accelerator more transactions will be confirmed and it will have effect. But the fee paid are cost in fee and not advisable. If it is a free accelerator like ViaBTC free accelerator, it is good.

[abel1337]

Does the widespread of ordinals has anything to do with current transactions speeds? As far as I know yes, but correct me if I'm wrong, I'm not really sure to be honest. It's just that ordinals are being hyped right now and that is the reason why we have transactions that are stuck.

I have a bitcoin transaction currently that are stuck and it's quite frustrating since I the last time I experienced it was a very long time ago where it will take days/weeks to arrive on my wallet.

I'm using an accelerator since I'm using it before and I believe that it can help internally.

[AicecreaME]

We have no choice but to wait.
If you want faster transaction in this kind of situation, use higher fee, but if you're willing to wait for your transaction to be confirmed, use lower fee to save, simple as that. This kind of scenario is always happening each year, the sudden outburst of transaction fee, which always resolved after some time so it's always about patient.

[Litzki1990]

Many times before I have noticed the abnormal high transaction fee of Bitcoin and every time I was patient despite my need and after patience the transaction fee normalized and at that time I traded my Bitcoin. Bitcoin transaction fees are very high at this time and I have enough need to trade bitcoins but still I am waiting for transaction fees to normalize. To trade the amount of bitcoins I need to trade, I have to pay a lot of money in transaction fees which I cannot afford. Those who need to transact right now but transaction fees are a big issue for them must have no choice but to wait because trading now will result in loss but not profit.

[someone703]

The Bitcoin mempool situation is more than just a tech glitch; it's a straight-up stranglehold on everything Bitcoin was supposed to be about – freedom, speed, and access for everyone. The fees are ballooning, the backlog's growing, and it's not just numbers on a screen – it's real people's lives getting jammed up.

Missing that investment opportunity because the network was moving like molasses? That wasn't just bad luck, that's the human cost of this congestion. It's not just about missed profits, it's about broken trust, anxieties skyrocketing, and feeling like your money's being held hostage by a clogged-up system.

Sure, the "big whales" with their fat transactions can probably shrug off the storm, but it's the everyday folks, the lifeblood of the network, who get squeezed the hardest. Fiat currencies might have their issues, but at least you know roughly how long it'll take and how much it'll cost. Bitcoin, the supposed liberator, has turned into a gatekeeper, demanding outrageous fees just to let you use your own damn money.