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I have read some posts about transactions never to be confirmed, but those post implied small transfers with no fees.

In my case my two transactions have something like 0.000428 BTC of fee.

I don't know if the fee is too small. I have not chosen, it was my wallet Coinmoni that did it for me.

Anyway after almost 3 days without the 2 transactions being confirmed... my first impression is that there is a flaw in the Bitcoin system. What is the guarantee the transaction ever happens ?

No guarantee. Am I wrong ? It's up to miners to choose the block they will compute.

What's the community thinking about transfers not being validated ? Isn't it a problem if Bitcoin really wants to become a public payment method, if transfer/transactions are not guaranted to be validated ?

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When you broadcast a transaction, to get a confirmation you're bidding for blockchain space, a limited good. Since blocks currently supply only one megabyte of space, miners maximize their profit by selecting transaction in order of fee rate, i.e. the number of satoshis offered to the miners per byte of transaction size. (Unless there is an additional out-of-band payment that skews selection.) The amount of value transferred has no direct influence on the selection, and there is no guarantee for inclusion, the transaction selection is the miner's prerogative.

It is however your prerogative to increase your bid by updating and re-broadcasting your transaction.

Yes, this is a problem to some degree which is why there are protocol upgrades (e.g. SegWit, Schnorr Signatures, Signature Aggregation, Lightning Network) waiting to be activated (or in the making) that will provide a larger throughput.

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Your bitcoins are still in your wallet. Bitcoins can't get "stuck", it just may not seem that way as your coinomi bitcoin wallet says 0 balance now, but until bitcoin transaction is actually confirmed they actually haven't left your wallet! And if your transaction doesn't automatically confirm you still have a few methods to RE send the miner fee and reset the transaction without losing any bitcoin (minus a small miner transaction fee but you were supposed to pay that correctly in the first place! Always pay attention! And make sure your miner fee looks correct! but it's ok I know it was your wallet that I also would have expected to work automatically. Maybe once you get the bitcoin transaction confirmed you should update your coinomi wallet app maybe or use a new wallet!

Also it's only been 4 hours. Your.0004btc fee should have been a lot higher and I am no expert on how long your transaction will take at that low fee rate, but I doubt it will just fix itself by simply waiting for a miner to pick up your transaction....but it's ok you can resend the fee! And there are some more options... don't worry your bitcoins are safe, you may need someone's help to get this fixed fast but you should be able to follow these directions below from his great article on this exact problem. Including a “transaction accelerator” from ViaBTC.com

If your transaction is stuck and includes at least 0.1 mBTC fee per kilobyte, you can submit the transaction-ID to ViaBTC, and the pool will prioritize it over other transactions. Since ViaBTC controls about seven percent of hash-power on the Bitcoin network, there is a good chance it will find a block within a couple of hours. The service is limited to 100 transactions per hour, however.

That's probably your best bet. Still, there are some more methods below, but most wallets don't support the first two methods so I just moved this solution here to the top!

From this article

What to Do if Your Bitcoin Transaction Gets "Stuck" After You’ve Sent It by Aaron van Wirdum
Staff Writer
Dec 6, 2016 11:39 AM EST

If you’ve already sent a transaction and it gets stuck, that transaction can, in some cases, be made to “jump the queue.”

Opt-in Replace-by-fee

The easiest way to make your transaction jump the queue is using an option called Opt-In Replace-by-Fee (Opt-In RBF). This lets you re-send the same transaction, but with a higher fee.

In most cases, when the same transaction is re-sent over the network, but with a higher fee, the new transaction is rejected by the network. Bitcoin nodes typically consider this new transaction a double spend, and will therefore not accept or relay it.

But when sending a transaction using Opt-In RBF, you essentially tell the network you may re-send that same transaction later on, but with a higher fee. As a result, most Bitcoin nodes will accept the new transaction in favor of the older one; allowing the new transaction to jump the queue.

Whether your new transaction will be included in the very next block does depend on which miner mines that next block: not all miners support Opt-In RBF. However, enough miners support the option to, in all likelihood, have your transaction included in one of the next couple blocks.

Opt-In RBF is currently supported by two wallets: Electrum and GreenAddress. Depending on the wallet, you may need to enable Opt-In RBF in the settings menu before you send the (first) transaction.

Child Pays for Parent

If your wallet does not support Opt-In RBF, things get a bit more complex.

Child Pays for Parent (CPFP) may do the trick. Applying CPFP, miners don't necessarily pick the transactions that include the most fees, but instead pick a set of transactions that include most combined fees.

Without getting into too many technical details, most outgoing transactions do not only send bitcoins to the receiver, but they also send “change” back to you. You can spend this change in a next transaction.

Some wallets let you spend this change even while it is still unconfirmed, so you can send this change to yourself in a new transaction. This time, make sure to include a high enough fee to compensate for the original low fee transaction. A miner should pick up the whole set of transactions and confirm them all at once.

If your wallet does not let you select which bitcoins to spend exactly — meaning you cannot specifically spend the unconfirmed change — you can try spending all funds in the wallet to yourself; this should include the change.

Like Opt-In RBF, not all miners currently support CPFP. But enough of them do to probably have your transaction confirmed in one of the next blocks.

Or...

If neither Opt-In RBF nor CPFP are an option, you can technically still try and transmit the original transaction with a higher fee. This is typically referred to as “full replace-by-fee,” which some miners accept. However, publicly available wallets currently do not support this as an option.

Otherwise, you may just have to wait either until the transaction confirms or until the bitcoins reappear in your wallet. It’s important to note that until a transaction confirms, the bitcoins are technically still in your wallet — it’s just that it often doesn’t appear that way. The bitcoins are not literally “stuck” on the network and cannot get lost.

Update: Since completion of this article, mining pool ViaBTC started offering a “transaction accelerator”. If your transaction is stuck and includes at least 0.1 mBTC fee per kilobyte, you can submit the transaction-ID to ViaBTC, and the pool will prioritize it over other transactions. Since ViaBTC controls about seven percent of hash-power on the Bitcoin network, there is a good chance it will find a block within a couple of hours. The service is limited to 100 transactions per hour, however.

As the Receiver

Of course, a transaction can also get stuck if you’re on the receiving end of it.

If your wallet allows spending unconfirmed transactions, this can be solved with CPFP as well. Much like as mentioned before, you can re-spend the unconfirmed, incoming bitcoins to yourself, including a fee high enough to compensate for the initial low fee transaction. If the new fee is sufficient, the transaction should typically confirm within a couple of blocks.

The only other option is to ask the sender whether he used Opt-In RBF. If so, he can re-send the transaction with a higher fee.

Update: Of course, ViaBTC’s transaction accelerator (mentioned above) works for incoming transactions as well.

So you are fine! Your $7500 is safe! You didn't lose it. Try the different methods I listed and also remember that you did send a normal fee it maybe should have been higher but it's all good.

(tldr: You can pay the BTC miners at viaBTC.com's new "transaction accelator" to get your transaction through for a small fee!)

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    Could you please format this post to make it more readable? Perhaps put a few headlines in it, and put the quote into a quote block.
    – Murch
    Commented May 16, 2017 at 16:39
  • Seems Desire did it for me! very nice! I like the way it looks much better now! Hey you should get on steemit.com man you would do well there if you have been into Bitcoin and have been basically blogging/commenting here about them like you have been here! You will do great! I have over 2k steempower on there and so far steem is $1 per steem token but you will grow fast man, you should really get on fast before you miss the blockchain internet revolution ground floor! ANyway man thanks for the attention here! I hear ViaBTC is shutting down since its in China, so my answer needs changes lol Commented Oct 13, 2017 at 13:52
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If your bitcoins transaction stuck. There are several options for confirming stuck transactions:

For both the recipient and the sender of the transaction, you can:

Wait for the transaction to confirm Wait for the network to "forget" about the transaction Ask a miner to confirm it for you

For the sender of a transaction, you can also:

Attempt an Replace-By-Fee double spend transaction If you have a change output, you can attempt a Child-Pays-For-Parent transaction For the recipient of a transaction, you can also: Attempt a Child-Pays-For-Parent transaction

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