I recently tried to make a transaction with coinbase. In a hurry I put no fee though. It's still unconfirmed and blockchain.info doesn't recognize my hash. But my btc qt wallet is debited. My question is what is the longest unconfirmed transaction you've heard of? Mine is going on 16 days. I'm curious because I would still like the transaction to still go through.
1 Answer
A transaction could go unconfirmed indefinitely.
The order in which transactions are confirmed is decided by miners, and generally they will be incentivized to include only the highest fee-rate transactions, to maximize their revenue.
Even a low fee-rate transaction may eventually confirm, once the mempool clears out. But there is no guarantee of this, if the mempool is full for an extended period of time, many nodes may drop the lowest fee-rate transactions from their mempool, to free up memory resources (otherwise, you could DoS attack the network by publishing infinite low-feerate transactions).
Ultimately, once you publish a transaction to the network, you cannot be certain if or when it will be confirmed, until it is. By paying a high fee-rate, you can help increase the chances you will see a quick confirmation. On the other hand, a low fee-rate transaction may never be confirmed, as eventually all nodes may 'forget' about it.
If you have been waiting a long time for a transaction to be confirmed, you could publish a new transaction that spends the same output, but with a higher fee. You may have to force your wallet to forget the old transaction so that it will craft a new one (eg bitcoin-cli abandontransaction "txid" when using bitcoin-core), but not all wallets will include this functionality.
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1So do I have the record? 17days now. I've emailed coinbase about paying a miner to hash it and charge me the appropriate fee. I still want the tx to go through. I don't think they even understand what I'm talking about. Anyone in the community who wants to make some money and do this, let me know?– daveCommented Oct 22, 2019 at 9:08
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1They might not offer it, but shouldn't they be able to. I'm saying shouldn't they be able to offer such a service. They claim to be this great crypto company. But they are revealing themselves to be the next WeWork. At least in my eyes. I'm just looking for help on my transaction. I didn't mean to turn this into a condemnation on coinbase. It is what it is. I've gotten better results on the dark web. Use coinbase at your own peril. I have screen shots of it all too. I'm not just ranting. I have documentation of their failure. Anyone have a good crypto lawyer?– daveCommented Oct 22, 2019 at 14:48
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@dave your transaction certainly holds no ‘longest-unconfirmed record’. if you’d like to send a payment to someone, it is your responsibility to ensure the transaction will confirm. No business is liable to ‘help confirm’ a transaction that will otherwise not confirm of its own accord.– chytrikCommented Oct 22, 2019 at 17:30
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I understand, my beef is not with the blockchain. It's with coinbases lack of customer service and support. Again, I truly don't think they are aware of the engineering behind btc. I've asked them to approach a mining pool, like viabtc or antpool to find my block and hash it. I told them to push the fee onto my coinbase account. They haven't gotten back to me in 5 days. It seems everyone is upset with my discontent with coinbase. What would you suggest I do? Real talk. Please advise in simply and pragmatically. Bear in mind my btc qt is syncing now from upgrading and is taking forever. Thanks– daveCommented Oct 22, 2019 at 18:10