Everything You Need to Know About Stuck Transactions and How to Fix Them

So what exactly is a "stuck" transaction? Why do they happen? A stuck transaction is basically one that’s been left unconfirmed for longer than the sender or receiver are comfortable with. This can be pretty frustrating because the recipient might think the sender hasn’t paid, or maybe they really need the money ASAP. Usually, stuck transactions happen because of low fees. But there are other reasons too, like if you’re trying to use coins from an unconfirmed transaction, dealing with tiny outputs, or if it’s a double spend situation. If there’s a double spend and that one gets confirmed, then your transaction is pretty much stuck for good since it can't confirm anymore. So what can you do to get your stuck transaction moving? There are several things you can try to get stuck transactions confirmed. For both the sender and receiver, you can: - Just wait for it to confirm - Hope the network forgets about it - Ask a miner to help confirm it If you’re the sender, you can also: - Try a Replace-By-Fee transaction to double spend it - If you have a change output, consider a Child-Pays-For-Parent transaction And if you’re the recipient, you can: - Also try that Child-Pays-For-Parent transaction Waiting it out If you can't do any of those other things or just don't want to risk it, you can always wait and see if the transaction eventually gets confirmed. Just make sure the network keeps being reminded about it.

Great tutorial A couple remarks: 1) it's also possible to do a CPFP if you're the sender, as long as there was a change address that received an input with a value high enough to cover the fees of both the parent and the child transaction. If there is no/insufficient change, only the receiver can do a CPFP. 2) RBF is possible with electrum, you can move it to the wallets for which it is an easy thing to do... You can opt-in RBF when creating a transaction, the transaction will be indicated as replaceble in the history tab, and when you right click on a replaceble transaction, you can increase the fee (don't remember the exact icons/descriptions used, since i only tested it out once). 3) Since you use double spending unconfirmed inputs as a way to do a RBF, about any wallet whose private key/xprv can be exported should be able to do a RBF. This should include Blockchain.info, multibit, Bitcoin Wallet for Android. Granted, the procedure becomes pretty long and tedious, since you would first have to get your hands on the private keys for the addresses whose unspent outputs were used in the hanging transaction, and then you'd have to import them in core, and then you would have to generate a raw tx, sign it, broadcast it... But it IS possible 4) in the "Waiting for the network to "forget" about the transaction", maybe you should add the warning that some wallets (like core) keep broadcasting the transaction, unless you abandon it, or zap the wallet txes? 5) some shameless promotion about CPFP, if you use my (in) sufficient fee checker on my website (mocacinno.com), i try to generate an unsigned CPFP tx for my visitors if i detect insufficient fees. This feature is still in beta, but in my (small amount) of testcases, it did work (bug reports are always welcome, only works with reasonably simple transactions).

Thank you very much for misleading unsuspecting users. Are you doing this on purpose?

No. It seems that I forgot to hit send for my reply to you in PM. What I am trying to do here is to explain how to do RBF spends without opting into RBF because very few people use Opt in RBF. All I could find on Electrum was how to do it with Opt in RBF, not any way to RBF without opting in. If you could provide instructions for how to do that, I would happily add it to the list.

If you restore from seed unconfirmed transactions are removed IIRC. Thus you can restore from on a temp wallet, create a double spend and continue. I personally think the opt-in RBF option by electrum is an improvement over this as you can replace a transaction you have created a few minutes ago, while your way would suffer from nodes blocking propagation.

I asked someone to try this and it did not work for them. Opt-in RBF is indeed a great feature. Unfortunately it is not used by most people so it is not really applicable here as most transactions will not enable RBF.

Alright, Ill need to get this out of my head then. Thanks Yeah, Im working on a similar thread to this for the german section and I put it in the "preparations" section because of this.

what the OP of this thread calls "RBF" is actually a double spend attempt. it is misleading and dishonest to call it RBF.

quick question guys i sent some bitcoins to an address the coin was never confirmed after 2 days they put the money back on my wallet,then about an hour later the money was gone again,i checked my wallet again now its at another address that i didn't even send them to,and that transaction has more than 600 conformations,and it also says unspent to that address.....so how do i retrieve my bitcoins

RBF is, by definition, a double spend attempt, regardless of Opt-in or not. You are creating a transaction which spends inputs already spent by an unconfirmed transaction. This method is Full RBF, not Opt-in or First-Seen-Safe RBF. It is still RBF and is as Peter Todd originally proposed RBF.

i just found this service but still not sure if this works https://pushtx.btc.com/ but since btc.com seems to be trusted, this might be helpful to some people, tho they charge kinda high fee

They are charging $ 6.88 / KB which is not worth. I entered my transaction Id and got an option to pay almost double the amount as the transaction size was 1518 Bytes. Viabtc works for free and transactions get confirmed for sure. @OP: I couldn't find much information about CPFP method. Is it the same as double spending? I need to get my transaction confirmed and hence am asking.

there is article here to share with you http://coinour.com/index.php/how-to-do-with-stuck-bitcoin-transaction/

CPFP is not the same as double spending or RBF. It requires that you spend from an unconfirmed transaction, something that most wallets don't allow, so I don't have instructions for how to do it. If you know how to work with raw transactions, then CPFP can be done.

great read! I think you could add https://www.viabtc.com/tools/txaccelerator/     to your  "What can I do to make my stuck transaction confirm? "  paragraph the tool is not extremely helpful as it only allows you to accelerate up to 100 transactions per hour and all the slots are usually filled up after 5-10 minutes from  the hour start,but it does help to confirm your tx when everything else fails as it includes your transaction into a block directly

The problem is, most noobs use web wallets because they are too lazy to download Core, or any of the wallets that will give you proper options like -zapwallettxes, RPF or whatever. The "asking for miners" resort is pretty lame and not very user friendly... it's a problem. Web wallets should be forced to give more options in case this happens.

Still, if people are genuinely aiming for Bitcoin to be more convenient for less techy new users like me, wallets should be able to handle these issues themselves.  Of course you should be able to change these options and make your own choices but I don't think there's anything wrong with experimenting by using a more simplified wallet.

The problem is, most noobs use web wallets because they are too lazy to download Core, or any of the wallets that will give you proper options like -zapwallettxes, RPF or whatever. Not too lazy, but take up too much memory。If the memory footprint is small, I will choose CORE wallet.It's really big.Is this the cause of the obstruction?

Newbies by definition are new and most introductory guides you can find out there are outdated or have not kept abreast with this issue of extended confirmation times - an issue even most wallets do not alert users about when signing up. Rather than laziness, it's simply a matter of being inadequate information. And, as you say, even with the information available, the added resources needed for Core and the like are cons that would put off even users like me. That been said, I've now switched even to storing the coins I move frequently in the in-house wallets of some sites, which charge a flat fee regardless of output. I've found these to confirm very quickly, as my txs are performed as part of a large batch with generous fees. As usual, very helpful post from OP. I hope more free services like viabtc come about. I've used it myself after >3 days unconfirmed and it pushes through in hours.

I got stuck transaction for 12 hours, and it's been unconfirmed and is in memory pool. I tried the RBF option using core 0.14 and windows 10. I already done the 'abandon transaction' step and resend with higher fee, now waiting for it to be completed. However I realise the abandoned transaction is not come back to my balance, now I get deduct twice the amount I intended to send. is it a known issue ? Like the previous transaction is 1 BTC, now I resend another 1 BTC, now my balance is deducted by 2 BTC .... Do I need to wait ?