Bitcoin transaction as been unconfirmed for 9 days

Question

Please what can I do? I received a transfer of 0.559btc and it has remained unconfirmed for 9 days, I can't even find it again on the blockchain.info but it was there for almost 4 days. I can see the transaction here on tradeblock. I have alerted the company that made the transfer to me but their customer service is horrible. Please any help? Can I still get this deposit?

Also why did it disappear from blockchain.info?

Answer 1

When transactions are published to the network, they first are mere payment promises. You have received notice of a transaction on the network to one of your addresses. However, for the money to actually become signed over to you, transactions need to be confirmed by being included in a block of the Bitcoin blockchain.

Most nodes on the network track unconfirmed transactions on the network only for a few days before they drop them from their memory pool. For example in Bitcoin Core this timelimit used to be three days previously and is now fourteen days. It seems that blockchain.info dropped the transaction because it timed out of their memory pool.

To speed up confirmation of the transaction, you could try to construct a child-pays-for-parent transaction: you would send another payment from your wallet and spend the money that you would receive from the unconfirmed transaction. If you use Bitcoin Core, you can specifically select inputs by enabling the "coin control features" in the settings. Otherwise, you can enforce spending the unconfirmed transfer by spending your complete balance. Many recent wallets will then automatically generate a new transaction with a higher fee that should get both the parent and the new transaction confirmed.

Unfortunately, the only other options are

1. to wait it out
2. to request that the sender updates their payment with a higher fee.

In this particular case, I think that your transaction should soon go through, as there are currently only about 3MB of transactions above 240 satoshi/byte and the one that you're waiting for pays ~239.18 sat/B.