Hey everyone, I sold a couple of domains and got paid in Bitcoin by the buyer through 2 transactions. I transferred the domains, but now these BTC transactions have been pending for more than 5 days. It looks like the buyer isn’t doing much to sort this out since he opted for a really low fee of 1000 and 1500 satoshis. He mentioned that Bitpay told him there's nothing they can do and it should confirm in a few days. My transactions have gone from over 10K confirmations in the queue to over 100K just today, so I'm starting to think they might never get confirmed. I read somewhere that unconfirmed transactions can be reversed or resent if you pay a higher fee. If that’s not possible, will they just drop out of the pool after 21 days?
Thanks a lot for any advice!
BR
P.S. Here are the two transactions:
There are two pending transactions in your address. Both of them add some bitcoin to your wallet, about 190 USD and 330 USD.
You can see your transactions here:
https://mempool.space/tx/6b06bb5d532f22ffc49f9f59c41ad3b1397509477e68ea13859543a726fa2a6f
https://mempool.space/tx/eb5ca532d2dc1468e2fe632558481ad09a749c724fab7f9ddca0a236b2a2fc9e
The payer used a low fee, which is 7 sat/vbyte.
The mempool is not a exactly a line. If someone send now a 8sat/vbyte transaction, it will get confirmed earlier than yours. Miners put whatever pays more first.
If you can, just wait. it willl get confirmed eventually. Don't worry, and it may take a few more days to get confirmed.
You are right and they can be reversed using a higher fee.
They both have RBF disabled, so you cannot "bump" them.
But you can spend those coins, paying a much higher fee for both transactions, in a process called Child Pays for Parent (CPFP).
This is how to do it in Electrum
https://electrum.readthedocs.io/en/latest/faq.html
These transactions raise suspicion, the buyers knew it was a deal transaction, he should have increase the fee higher so that you can get it faster but decided to use lower fee, it looks like a flash transaction.
Your transaction doesn't have a replace by fee enabled, that means it will be impossible to bump the fee or for a child to pay for parent, by this you cannot do anything rather than to wait. Even the sender cannot do anything at this point, if the fee comes lower, it will confirm but I doubt if that will happen as today is just Monday(busy day), maybe you should wait if the mempool will be lower by the weekend.
If the transaction refuse to confirm and dropped, then you lose the domain and the money except if you are closer to the seller, you can tell him to resend.
If your wallet allows you to send unconfirmed inputs and has coin control: just send those 2 inputs to one of your own addresses with about 20-30 sat/vbyte. That should be enough to confirm faster. I can't really calculate the exact fee on mobile, I expect something around 5000 sats to be enough.
Even with replace by fee disabled (RBF) you can use Child Pays For Parent (CPFP).
You can do it in basically any wallet. just spend the coins and use a high fee (about 26 sat/vbyte in time of writing)
You did a wrong thing. You should never accept an unconfirmed transaction. There is no guarantee that an unconfirmed transaction will be finally confirmed.
Where did you get the 21 days from?
By default, transactions are dropped from the mempool, if they stay unconfirmed for 14 days.
(Nodes that have dropped unconfirmed transaction from their mempool can receive them again, if they are rebroadcasted.)
Note that your transactions are around 40 vMB from the tip and it's unlikely that they will be confirmed soon.
You didn't tell us what's the wallet you used for receiving the fund.
If you own the private key of the receiving address, you can do CPFP and make transactions confirmed faster.
The centralized Coinbase wallet(Coinbase exchange ) does not have a feature to do CPFP unless you use their self-custody wallet with seeds backup that you can import to Electrum and do CPFP transactions.
Coinbase support can't able to help you if you use the centralized wallet so the only thing that you can do right now is to wait for the mempool to become less congested.
Thank you Bitmaxz, will wait and if it does not confirm in the next 9 days, will simply contact the sender after.
He is a reputable member of the other domainers forum and I hope he will not make the same mistake in the future.
When your RBF is disabled on both sides of the transaction while sending it, the Childs Pay for Parent (CPFP) transactions can always come in to alter the transaction fee and get it confirmed faster.
Can this CPFP always ensure that you will be able to alter the parent fees to speed up the transaction? If it works on Electrum, do other wallets adhere to the same consensus?
Also, can CPFP be used while transacting between two different wallets?
Sounds frustrating if you'll wait this long.
I just wanted to know if those paid services of Bitcoin transaction accelerators will help in this case like ViaBTC since it has many partners in a mining pool.
Next time you should wait at least 3 confirmations before making such deal, it's a safe indication that you are making a good transactions but anyway since it was a reputable buyer, it might worth it to wait.
21 days is not a default setting of mempool and the default figure is 14 days but remember mempool operators can customize it to longer or shorter than the default value (14 days).
Transaction expiration
Bitcoin Core Config Generator (compatible with Bitcoin Core 25.0)
Mempool expiration: 336 hours = 14 days.
maxmempoolexpiry usually is set as 336 hours by most of mempools.
There is no such thing as RBF on both sides of transactions. A transaction is RBF-enabled or RBF-disabled.
CPFP can be done only if you have full control over one of the receiving addresses. So, it's not that CPFP can be always done.
If you have the private key of the one of the receiving addresses, you can use electrum or any other wallet that allow you to spend unconfirmed outputs to do CPFP.
Child-Pays-for-Parent doesn't actually increase the fee of the parent, it's just the result of current default selection of transactions used by miners.
Here's the PR when it's implemented: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/7600
What actually happens is the parent and children transaction fees and sizes are all taken into consideration when getting the overall fee rate,
Kind of like a "bundle deal", you sent a transaction that pays a high fee but it can't be mined unless its parent is mined as well.
So the miners have to check if the overall fee rate when the parent is included is still higher than the other transactions in their mempool.
With that, it's not limited to Electrum, as long as miners use the same transaction selection method, CPFP will work.
I never had experience using the Paid service of ViaBTC accelerator but since they own a pool they can be able to speed up the transaction.
By default, a pool like Viabtc prioritizes transactions that pay higher fees automatically. However, The pool owner or the pool operator can manually choose what transaction they want to add to the block.
Viabtc's paid service should work in this case the only problem is the paid service is a bit expensive and not good for small transactions.
i also had a transaction that was stuck a few days ago and it was quite frustrating, i used Safepal Wallet and chose the lowest fee but it was really unlucky, the fee increased drastically and my transaction couldn't be processed quickly, i just used this as a good experience (bad) lol.
[1] https://mempool.space/docs/faq#how-to-get-transaction-confirmed-quickly
i just read about RBF or CPFP in the article above and don't really understand the process, maybe I'll try it next week.
For $100-$200 worth of BTC Viabtc is simply a no-go, they were charging a ton and on top of that OPs tx are not even one input one output, Viabtc was charging over 200sat/b extra the last time I looked at them for a tx. Best case scenario OP would look at a $100 worth of fee.
I'm saying this approximately because, and this i a pretty weird thing, Viabtc paid service always returns an error, I tried the free one, it works perfectly it recognizes transactions, I even managed to accelerate one but the paid one give me an error all the time. It might be because I'm on mobile but I tried desktop view in FF and Chrome and it's still the same.
Anyhow, seeing how both wallets are centralized, there is no way to CPFP it probably it has to be a paid tx as that 7sat/b will not get confirmed too soon and I'm not sure how much the OP can trust his business partner.
I just checked that on PC and I confirm that their paid service is not working.
I submitted several transaction IDs with the fee rates ranging from 8 sat/vbyte to 15 sat/vbyte to their paid service and got error for all of them. It only displays a message at top of the screen saying "Error" without any explanation on what causing the error.