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If I want to make a transaction and send it without fee, how long will it take to get confirmed?

My friend told me it will take more than 1 day. Can anyone here explain to me why that can be happen ?

5 Answers 5

4

Confirming transactions without any fee depends on the Bitcoin miner's goodwill. Because miners won't get any compensation for confirming your transaction, it means they do not have incentive to put your transaction in the blocks they mine. Thus, if the Bitcoin blockchain is busy, transactions with a higher fee are more likely to be confirmed.

However the default Bitcoind behavior also considers other factors besides the transaction fee when choosing transactions to include. These are transaction age and size in bytes. More information available here: http://bitcoinfees.com/ Also some miners choose not to follow the default Bitcoin transaction fee mechanisms.

In practice, when writing this, zero fee transactions usually confirm between 1-7 days.

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In addition to what Mikko said, there have been some recent stress tests on the bitcoin network in which a flood of low-fee transactions have been pushed through the system. When the blocksize becomes full (currently 1MB per block, though that is configurable [can be smaller, but not larger] by each miner) it is likely that the miners will take the transactions with the highest fees. Since you are talking about a 0 fee transaction, yours would probably be left behind until the more expensive transactions are processed.

Think of it like a train in which you can pay what you want to ride (and can also pay 0). If there are a bunch of people waving dollar bills around when the train pulls up, the conductor will let them on first. Your cheapness will mean you wait for the next train... unless the same thing happens again (and it might!).

In the recent tests, some transactions took up to 8 hours to get their first confirmation. This may change in the future, assuming the blockchain max size gets adjusted (there is a big debate on what to do next going on right now in the bitcoin circles).

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it does require around 1-7 days from my experience before, Basically you it has a very small priority since all the transactions with fees will have a priority over it. if it's for a value of ~0.01-0.10 BTC it will most likely go through, if it's less there is a possibility that it will remain pending for multiple days. Sometimes it can get stuck too like this one (Sent bitcoin with no fee, waited and bitcoins disappeared) Best thing is to include the standard fee or even some fees to avoid inconveniences.

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It's all depend on supply and demand, transaction with higher fees will get processed first, while lower fees have to wait.

You may refer to something like this: https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/ to see how much fee to pay and the expected time for transaction

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right now there are over 60000 transactions with fees ranging from 0 to 40 satoshis/byte that may never get confirmed. I myself recently had to abort transactions with much higher fees (80 and 265 satoshis/byte) because they didn't get confirmed.

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