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I am using blockchain.info.

I have made a bitcoin transaction of 22.00883562 BTC to the address 1A9eUAc78tGx65X3CuC9WfSKXXgxjU8ccC.

You can see the transaction at https://blockchain.info/tx/97c1af82111cdcf17f878eb6df20c17c59c1b1fc04e8cdce36b8ac6c6d1c969a

I have paid a 0.001 fee but it has been almost 30 hours and it still shows "Unconfirmed".

What could be the error? Also, more importantly, how do I cancel the unconfirmed transaction and get back my coins?

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  • It seems like your transaction has been confirmed now.
    – Greg Hewgill
    Commented Mar 6, 2014 at 0:31
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    @GregHewgill, that's irrelevant. The question was how does one cancel an unconfirmed blockchain transaction.
    – Pacerier
    Commented Mar 7, 2014 at 5:15
  • Well, that answers the "What could be the error?" question - there was no error.
    – Greg Hewgill
    Commented Mar 7, 2014 at 8:26
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    @GregHewgill, considering that he paid 0.001 (10x more the norm) fee, staying "Unconfirmed" for 30 hours is extremely weird and I would say there's a high chance that there's an error with blockchain.info.
    – Pacerier
    Commented Mar 9, 2014 at 16:21
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    Possible duplicate of Is it possible to cancel an unconfirmed transaction?
    – Elias Zamaria
    Commented Dec 3, 2016 at 0:53

2 Answers 2

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Cancelling unconfirmed transactions is easy. Just submit a higher fee double-spend transaction. For example: if you sent a 0-fee transaction, it could take a day before it gets mined onto a block. You can send another transaction with the same inputs that just sends the money back to yourself. On this transaction you put a higher fee. This becomes more likely to be mined and will get included in the blockchain - invalidating the slower-to-confirm original.

Some tools to help out: https://github.com/petertodd/replace-by-fee-tools

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    How do you double spend if you are sending from a wallet and now no longer have that same amount? IE I've sent from an XRP wallet to Changelly to convert it to BTC over at Coinbase. Now I don't have enough XRP to send.
    – Leon Gaban
    Commented May 26, 2017 at 21:42
  • This. In theory looks nice, in practice but really
    – PedroD
    Commented Jun 6, 2017 at 8:37
  • @LeonGaban: I believe that in that case, you're screwed. Anybody knows a workaround?
    – PPC
    Commented Jun 23, 2017 at 11:30
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You cannot cancel an unconfirmed transaction. When a transaction has been transmitted to the chain, it's unstoppable. Luckily everything went well for you I see, and it was probably an error on blockchain.info, as pointed out in the comments.

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    You can cancel an unconfirmed transaction - by double spend this input, therefore original tx will be canceled. Moreover, even if transaction is included in block, it can be canceled - all you need to do is to mine two consecutive blocks without this tx. Therefore, the first block will be orphaned, and all the transaction it has will be unvalidated. This is the very reason we should wait for 6 confirmations.
    – Maciej Mączko
    Commented Apr 24, 2014 at 19:33
  • Ahh, I didnt know that. But isnt it quite easy to cancel your BTC transaction in the supermarket (when its implemented), a few seconds after your transaction? That would be a huge disadvantage
    – Mathias711
    Commented Apr 24, 2014 at 19:40
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    I didn't say it is easy, only that it is possible. I think we can pull this on our own. All we need to do is to buy cheap VPS across the globe (digital ocean?), and using ssh - double spend our coins to our address as soon as we initialize transacion in the supermarket. This is double spending. Note that the bigest BTC processor, Bitpay, does accept 0/unconfirmed txs, because they understand the risk and pay for double spends from their own pocket.
    – Maciej Mączko
    Commented Apr 24, 2014 at 19:57
  • Cancelling unconfirmed transactions is easy. Just submit a higher fee double-spend transaction.
    – Erik Aronesty
    Commented Jan 15, 2016 at 18:34
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    @PPC Thanks for your comment. As I said three years ago, it isn't easy, it is (was) possible. Back then, strong ASIC would give you two consecutive blocks once in a month.
    – Maciej Mączko
    Commented Jun 24, 2017 at 21:06

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