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Can a transaction disappear after a transaction is submitted to the Bitcoin network?

I read about stale blocks. Are all transactions in a stale block going away? Is there a possibility that transactions will be lost in the bitcoin network?

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When a block, or set of blocks, is dropped (orphan block, minor fork, chain reorganization), any transactions in those blocks are returned to the mempool. Usually, many of these transactions will be contained in the blocks that replace the dropped blocks, and end up in the chain anyways.

It is relatively rare for a transaction to outright disappear, and will never happen for a transaction with sufficient confirmations. It is not unheard of for transactions with very low fees to be evicted from the mempools of enough nodes to be lost entirely during times of network congestion, however.

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  • There is also the possibility that a conflicting transaction is included in the alternative chaintip which would prevent the original transaction from getting included (a doublespend).
    – Murch ♦
    Oct 20 at 14:38

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