Retrieving my unspent Bitcoin output

Question

I have sent my only begotten BTC from my exchange currency account but not yet received in my blockchain wallet, and when I inquire with my transaction ID, I found my the transaction to be stuck for four days now... So, it seems to be there and but it is not clear when it will be released to my account. Should I be able to retrieve them back to a senders account.

Can we have that option please so that we can be safe and able to make some other options to use our money.

This thing of unspent outputs and stuff delays us to the business and for security being we won't trust the network for the fact that many are transaction awaited on an unknown same address. Those transactions stays for a long period of times.

Can we please given only an option to retrieve them back not anything else we may need on this. Maybe it could even ease the system to flow easy and transparent to us.

Answer 1

I'm afraid this is how Bitcoin works, and there is little we can do about it. Think of it like a bank transfer you initiate on a Friday, it has to be processed by the bank at some point in time, only banks do not settle transactions during weekends, and large backlogs will further delay the processing. Now replace the centralized bank, with the Bitcoin blockchain. While it does not have holidays, it does have to deal with backlogs.

In times of a large number of transactions hitting the network at the same time the backlog grows, and this has been the case for the last few days, since the network's capacity is lower than the influx of new transactions. You can get ahead of the queue by adding more fees to your transaction (try looking for RBF or CPFP), but in order for the backlog to be reduced we need some time (usually weekends) when the capacity of the network exceeds the influx of new transactions.

We can also not retract transactions, since that in itself would be another transaction that needs to be processed, and even worse, all nodes in the network would have to agree to discard the transaction, which is in itself a consensus problem, which is why we had to come up with the whole blockchain business in the first place.

So, while it certainly is frustrating having to wait for confirmations, it'll eventually confirm, and you can influence your position in the queue by adding more fees, replace-by-fee, or child-pays-for-parent.