120 votes

Why is my transaction not getting confirmed and what can I do about it?

How Bitcoin Mining Works Bitcoin transactions are mined (processed) by Miners, and Miners want to benefit from their work. By mining transactions with higher fees, they make more money. Some miners ...
Ron's user avatar
  • 1,453
38 votes
Accepted

Can bitcoin exist without miners?

if in the coming years the difficulty increases so much that mining is no longer profitable That's not really possible. The mining power is set so that the miners need 10 minutes in average to mine a ...
hardfork's user avatar
  • 2,117
31 votes

Recipient has “not received” the Bitcoin I sent, but the transaction is confirmed

It's not completely clear what the situation is, but from what I gather it seems that you're the sender and the recipient is not acknowledging a payment you have sent. Given that you have already ...
Murch's user avatar
  • 72.6k
29 votes

Recipient has “not received” the Bitcoin I sent, but the transaction is confirmed

The address received 0.07014343 BTC in 3d727e3f4565e011c0348f813c2d5480210b6bae2003a0f7abaa949d1a7c599a. These coins have already been spent, so at the very least the recipient's wallet provider is ...
Raghav Sood's user avatar
  • 16.9k
27 votes

Why is my transaction not getting confirmed and what can I do about it?

Here is a guide for as many wallets as I could figure out how to perform an RBF with. This is adapted from my bitcointalk post: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1802212.0 What is a "Stuck" ...
Andrew Chow's user avatar
  • 68.5k
25 votes

Why is my transaction not getting confirmed and what can I do about it?

In the case that your fee is too low: Now that child-pays-for-parent has been merged, you(or any of the recipients of your unconfirmed transaction) could spend the Bitcoin received and the fee ...
Steve Ellis's user avatar
  • 1,062
22 votes

Recipient has “not received” the Bitcoin I sent, but the transaction is confirmed

This is mainly adding to @Raghav Sood's answer: A quick google search brought me here from which I found this: https://blockexplorer.com/ Searching your bitcoin address in this website gives ...
user13267's user avatar
  • 321
15 votes
Accepted

With 100% segwit transactions, what would be the max number of transaction confirmation possible on a block?

Very interesting question, let's see what the smallest transaction we can build is. For it to be minimal it has to be a single input and a single output. The non-segwit part would look something like ...
cdecker's user avatar
  • 9,309
13 votes

Why is my transaction not getting confirmed and what can I do about it?

The other answers cover most useful information already, I'd like to add one point though: The fee estimation of most wallets has significantly improved since blocks have gotten full. If you're ...
Murch's user avatar
  • 72.6k
13 votes
Accepted

Shortest and Longest block interval time ever recorded in Bitcoin

(This data is current through block 535276.) Based on block timestamps (which do not have to be accurate), the longest difference between successive blocks is 463160 seconds (5 days, 8 hours, 39 ...
Nate Eldredge's user avatar
9 votes

What is the "confirmation" field in a block?

Blocks in Bitcoin, as they exist in the blockchain, don't actually contain a confirmation field. When you query for a block in bitcoin-rpc or similar, additional information is added to the block ...
Maxwell Sanchez's user avatar
9 votes

Recipient has “not received” the Bitcoin I sent, but the transaction is confirmed

The Blockchain is the only truth At the time I wrote this, that transaction has 204 confirmations. That means it was absolutely definitely received. If the address is correct and the recipient says ...
RedGrittyBrick's user avatar
8 votes

Why is my transaction not getting confirmed and what can I do about it?

If you are using Electrum, there is no equivalent to -zapwallettxes. The closest thing you can do is to restore your wallet from a seed. This will wipe your client of any unconfirmed transactions. ...
Nick ODell's user avatar
  • 29.3k
7 votes
Accepted

When we can agree on mempool sorting order, we can just confirm first n-transactions that are at least 10 mins old. What's missing?

Your answer assumes different nodes can have a consistent view of the mempool. If that were the case, we wouldn't need a blockchain at all, whose sole purpose is establishing consistency between ...
Pieter Wuille's user avatar
6 votes

Why do nodes trust other nodes to approve their transactions?

I know that the blockchain technologie works so well, because everybody has basically a copy of the last ledger. Yes, every full bitcoin node has a copy of the blockchain (aka ledger). Therefore,...
karask's user avatar
  • 2,520
6 votes

Why can bitcoins never be refunded unless the receiver agrees to send back the money?

Bitcoin is like cash: You don't use an intermediary. If you send money to someone, they got it. The only way you can get is back is to make them hand it to you. If there is no intermediary, you can't ...
UTF-8's user avatar
  • 3,224
6 votes
Accepted

Why doesn't BTC reward miners for confirmations, too?

I'm not 100% sure I've understood your suggestion, in part because you've used some non-standard terminology. But it looks like this is actually two suggestions rolled into one. The first is a ...
Meni Rosenfeld's user avatar
5 votes
Accepted

How do you calculate a reasonable transaction fee?

See https://bitcoinfees.21.co/ for mempool size and tx fee. This will suggest fee in satoshi/byte depending on current network conditions. If you are looking to exact fee in BTC for spending from ...
dark knight's user avatar
  • 1,997
5 votes
Accepted

How would one monitor an address for a transaction and 1 confirmation in PHP?

Cron Jobs and 3rd Party API: You could try with cron jobs, but I wouldn't run it every second, that's rather exhaustive. Maybe every 5 or 10 minutes, and then have it check the current total ...
m1xolyd1an's user avatar
  • 5,596
5 votes
Accepted

Does desktop wallet need to be online for the coins to mature?

No, your wallet does not have to be online. Maturity depends on the block number in which a transaction was included into the blockchain.
Hans-Martin Mosner's user avatar
5 votes

Does desktop wallet need to be online for the coins to mature?

Receiving bitcoins is a completely passive process: The information of the received transaction gets added to the blockchain enabling you to reference it in the future when you want to spend the ...
Murch's user avatar
  • 72.6k
5 votes

What is the "confirmation" field in a block?

The concept of confirmation in Bitcoin is a measure for how deeply buried a block or transaction is in the blockchain. It measures how many blocks on top there are. More means the block or transaction ...
Pieter Wuille's user avatar
5 votes
Accepted

Do transactions with old UTXOs take longer to confirm?

No. The miners use Bitcoin Core or similar full node software to determine which transactions are valid and suitable for inclusion in a block. Bitcoin Core maintains a database of all unspent UXTOs. ...
Nate Eldredge's user avatar
5 votes
Accepted

What is the longest time a transaction has been in limbo for?

This question cannot be answered reliably. The only part of Bitcoin that is publicly known is the blockchain. The transactions that are confirmed are on the blockchain, that is shared online. The ...
Karel Bílek's user avatar
  • 2,685
5 votes
Accepted

I have received £46,21745 in my Bitcoin account. Should I confirm it?

I don't have any Bitcoin account [...] but I got an email that I have received £46,21745 in my account It is a lie. There's no money. It is a trick by criminals who will later ask you to pay some ...
RedGrittyBrick's user avatar
4 votes
Accepted

What technical properties does a confirmed Tx have that an unconfirmed Tx does not?

when we speak about specific transaction: no. The unconfirmed transaction looks exactly the same as the same transaction with 1,2.. confirmations. yes. There are 3 types of transaction: confirmed, ...
Anlhord Smithson's user avatar
4 votes

What happens if your transaction is never confirmed?

Whether a sender and recipient can rely on a transaction is a probabilistic matter, but a transaction's state is binary in regard to the current chain tip. Either, the transaction is confirmed and the ...
Murch's user avatar
  • 72.6k
4 votes
Accepted

Confirm own incoming transactions

This might only be an issue with the terminology, but when a transaction is "mined", it is included in a block. You could do that of course, if you were contributing blocks to the Bitcoin network, but ...
Murch's user avatar
  • 72.6k
4 votes

How do I know how many confirmations a transaction has?

As you can see at the bottom of your screenshot, or on any block explorer similar (https://blockchain.info/tx/2daf1bea238137e5db00cd12074a93f181bf86a759f1963fd92197671f32a463), you can see that it ...
meshcollider's user avatar
  • 11.8k

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