What to Do if your Bitcoin Transaction gets “Stuck” ?

Sometimes, our bitcoin transactions take awhile to get confirmations. I’m pretty sure that we all have experienced the same issue at least once. Worst case, we even have to wait at least 24 hours to get confirmations for our bitcoin transaction. Do you wanna know why?Read on and find out why in today’s post.

First, let’s find out what happens behind the scene. We all know that we need to pay transaction fees when we send bitcoin transactions. The fees you pay for the transaction plays an important role here. Let’s get more understanding with one simple example. When we want to buy an item on auction, we place a bid. If we bid a higher value, there is higher chance that we will get the item.

Same thing happens here. We bid with our transaction fees to the miners so that they will include our transaction in their block-logs. Most of the time, our transactions are stuck when we send transactions with low fees.The higher the fee you pay, the more likely it is for your transaction to be included. If we bid with low transaction fees, our transactions are outbid in the fee market. As for the current status, miners will eventually include low-free transactions in their block-logs. So, let’s learn how to solve that to get faster confirmations.

Solution: Before you send it

If you want your transactions to confirm faster in the blockchain network, you have several options before you send your transactions to the blockchain network.

• Try increasing the fee

The first thing you need to do if you want to get faster confirmation is to increase the transaction fees. You can get a suggestion from Bitcoinfees on how much the fees should be to except faster confirmations.

• Check for dynamic fees

Most Bitcoin wallets will let us choose the fee we want to pay when sending the transaction. The most common way is by selecting a transaction priority. To make sure your transaction gets confirmed quickly, it is recommended to always select high priority. If your wallet is not allowed to prioritize the fees, then you should consider changing the wallet.

Solution: After You’ve Sent It

If the transactions are taking too long to confirm after you have sent it, you can try to solve with these two options.

•  Opt-in Replace-by-Fee (Opt-in RBF)

If the wallet supports it, Opt-in RBF may be the easiest way to unstick your stuck bitcoin transaction. With Opt-in RBF, transactions can be flagged as replaceable up until the moment when they are confirmed in a block. Opt-in RBF allows you to “update” your transaction to increase the fee, which more often than not results in faster confirmation. The bitcoin wallets that currently support Opt-in RBF are Electrum, GreenAddress and Bitcoin-Core.

•  Child Pays for Parent

Unlike the Opt-in RBF, which are typically implemented by the sender, Child Pays for Parent (CPFP) is implemented by the recipient. Although the process is different depending on the recipient’s wallet, in a nutshell, it allows the recipient to unstick bitcoin transaction (the parent transaction) by creating a second transaction (the child transaction) of the same amount and sending it with a higher transaction fee. That way when the child transaction gets confirmed, it drags the parent transaction into confirmation right along with it.

So there you have it. The ways to unstick your stuck Bitcoin transactions.

Enjoy learning!