How to increase fee of existing transaction with bitcoin-cli

Question

I have broadcast a trasnaction from my bitcoincli wallet using this command:

./bitcoin-cli sendtoaddress ADDRESSGOESHERE 0.1

The problem is, it has set the fee to a very low amount by default.

After doing some more research, i found "bumpfee" but when i run this command:

./bitcoin-cli bumpfee TXID

i get this error? error code: -4 error message: Transaction is not BIP 125 replaceable

I also found another way was to run this:

./bitcoin-cli -conf=/mnt/blockchains/bitcoin/bitcoin.conf bumpfee TXIDGOESHERE

But that returns:

error: Could not locate RPC credentials. No authentication cookie could be found, and RPC password is not set. See -rpcpassword and -stdinrpcpass. Configuration file: (/mnt/blockchains/bitcoin/bitcoin.conf)

Is there a way for me to increase the fee of a transaction of someone else? That way, I can use my Electrum wallet to increase the fee of this transacton, but it doesn't seem to give me that option inside Electrum either.

I am using an old version of bitcoin-cli, perhaps I need to update it to the latest version?

Answer 1

You created a transaction that signaled finality. Your wallet will therefore not allow replacing it per the opt-in RBF rules specified in BIP125.

You have multiple options:

• Use child-pays-for-parent
  If your stuck transaction has a change output, you can spend the change output with a high-feerate transaction. Miners will then include the stuck parent transaction in order to collect the fee of the child.
• Abandon the stuck transaction
  1. Shut down Bitcoin Core
  2. Delete the mempool.dat to remove knowledge of the stuck transaction from the mempool because abandontransaction only works when the tx is not in the mempool
  3. Start Bitcoin Core with walletbroadcast=0, so your wallet doesn’t put it immediately back into the mempool
  4. Call abandontransaction "txid"
  5. Create a new transaction to replace the stuck transaction with a higher feerate that uses at least one of the inputs of the previous transactions to create a conflict
  6. Restart Bitcoin Core without the walletbroadcast=0 to return to the default behavior regarding submitting of transactions

You may want to consider upgrading to v24, since that version started marking all transactions built from the commandline as replaceable by default. Alternatively, you can use the replaceable parameter on the sendtoaddress RPC to explicitly mark future transactions as replaceable.

Answer 2

A transaction whose input sequences are all 0xFFFFFFFE or greater is not eligible for RBF. If at least one input sequence is less than 0xFFFFFFFE, the transaction may be replaced by fee.

Seems your transaction is before BIP 125.