Transaction with a high fee keeps getting skipped... Reason why?

Question

I was sent a transaction that has been unconfirmed for 3 days now - but the feerate is relatively high (53.8 sat/vB). Blocks have been confirming transactions with lower feerates for days, but for some reason skip over mine. For example, last night there were whole blocks of transactions < 50sat/vB, but for some reason they skipped over mine (ex: https://mempool.space/block/00000000000000000006e91bfcee72653533739b834f56c550405862508883f1).

My Tx: ed45c837d26c25fb6a763708376a87f1875ff57efbb0f56d1b26d00a16c1899e

I also see other unconfirmed transactions with high fees (https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/mempool/transactions?q=fee_per_kb_usd(17..40)&s=time(asc)#) some that have been waiting for weeks.

Is there a technical reason as to why miners are skipping over transactions like these?

Thanks!

Answer 1

$ src/bitcoin-cli getmempoolentry ed45c837d26c25fb6a763708376a87f1875ff57efbb0f56d1b26d00a16c1899e
{
  "fees": {
    "base": 0.00012042,
    "modified": 0.00012042,
    "ancestor": 0.00125452,
    "descendant": 0.00012042
  },
  "vsize": 224,
  "weight": 896,
  "fee": 0.00012042,
  "modifiedfee": 0.00012042,
  "time": 1612178927,
  "height": 668604,
  "descendantcount": 1,
  "descendantsize": 224,
  "descendantfees": 12042,
  "ancestorcount": 2,
  "ancestorsize": 22989,
  "ancestorfees": 125452,
  "wtxid": "ed45c837d26c25fb6a763708376a87f1875ff57efbb0f56d1b26d00a16c1899e",
  "depends": [
    "fb1183fa83759c51bd33d2bad9007804ea44f8256a7ae77f36f4f35a885a05d6"
  ],
  "spentby": [
  ],
  "bip125-replaceable": false,
  "unbroadcast": false
}

Looks like your transaction depends on another unconfirmed transaction, and that transaction is large and has a low feerate. The combined feerate of the two transactions is only around 5.45sat/vB, which presumably explains the long time to confirm.