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I just may have been scammed via a phishing link. The transaction is verified but not confirmed, I'm new to bitcoins, as you can probably tell. From the quick bit of research I've done there is nothing I can do. It was only $20.

Here's my question, Is there anyway to make sure the transaction doesn't confirm or send the bitcoins out of my wallet before it confirms?

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  • Basically, no. You can attempt to double-spend, but the Bitcoin protocol is designed to make this difficult to accomplish, and your odds of success are low. The recipient can also do things like increasing the transaction fee via child-pays-for-parent to encourage miners to confirm the original transaction instead of your attempted double-spend. The design goal of Bitcoin is that once a transaction is made, it cannot be undone, and you should generally not plan on being able to do that.
    – Nate Eldredge
    Mar 2, 2017 at 19:34
  • The transaction can be replaced under certain conditions. See my answer.
    – joe.js
    Mar 4, 2017 at 10:45

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I think Opt-in Replace By Fee is what you are looking for. The wallets implementing RBF lets you mark your transactions as unfinished and that let's you replace it with more fees than the previous one. But merchants are advised to wait for at least one confirmation before accepting optin rbf transactions (to avoid a double spending risk).

The only wallet I know that have implemented RBF is Electrum.

Below you have some useful links:

https://bitcoincore.org/en/faq/optin_rbf/

https://petertodd.org/2016/are-wallets-ready-for-rbf

https://electrum.org/#home

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  • I don't think RBF will help here. The goal of RBF is to allow a transaction to be replaced by a new transaction which has a higher fee but whose outputs are otherwise the same. It will not allow you to change or cancel a transaction. For that you need a true double-spend, and the aim of RBF is to provide a standard for miners to make it possible to increase fees without encouraging double-spend.
    – Nate Eldredge
    Mar 2, 2017 at 19:32
  • @NateEldredge As I understand, it's equally possible to make a double spend transaction with any type of unconfirmed transaction, being RBF or not. That's why I linked the Peter Todd's article where he studied the awareness of wallets to that kind of issue. Here you have the RBF BIP specification: github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/…. I did not found any official documentation that says replacements must have equal outputs, can you provide any source?
    – joe.js
    Mar 4, 2017 at 10:41
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    Sorry, you are right. I was thinking of the RBF-FSS variant.
    – Nate Eldredge
    Mar 4, 2017 at 15:00

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