Transactions are not confirming

I have several Bitsquare transactions which are not confirming.
They have been idle for more than 24 hours.
What can I do about it?

Seems the blockchain backlog is very large again. We use a fixed fee which is in such stress times (spam attacks) unfortunately a bit too low. In the next release we will use a dynamic fee so that should not happen anymore then.
See: https://tradeblock.com/bitcoin/
70k unconfirmed txs in backlog. Normally it is about a 5k-20k.
And f***ing AntPool is mining still empty blocks…

If the tx does not get confirmed in the trade period and one of the peer opens a dispute there will be no loss of the security deposit. The arbitrator will check and do the payout then.

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There is also a huge delay in confirming movements between accounts.
I’m still waiting two confirmations for a withdrawal since yesterday.

You can’t do anything. Just wait.

While we wait for bigger blocks, use the ViaBTC transaction accelerator as a workaround:

https://www.viabtc.com/tools/txaccelerator/

Check the Fee estimates at
https://bitcoinfees.21.co/
currently 140 satoshis/byte is suggested

in Bitsquare you can manually adjust your fees Settings, Settings, General Preferences, Withdrawal TX Fee.

Can the Update Alerts be used to send a message to remind people to remind them to use a larger fee, untill the update is out?

We will use https://bitcoinfees.21.co/ in our next release.
The fee in the settings is only for the withdrawal transactions not for the trade transactions! So adjusting that will not have any effect.

I used https://www.viabtc.com/tools/txaccelerator/ as @DanielFragaBR suggested, and it worked! It didn’t cost anything, and all I did was post my deposit transaction ID from the bitsquare contract that still had zero confirmations, and a few hours later the transaction was included in a confirmed block.

So, perhaps that could help others who are waiting.

Joel

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I am wondering what business model is behind that. Sounds a bit catchy to me, but don’t know any details why and how they do that.

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Yeah, after posting my results, I used them to “accelerate” three more bitsquare transactions last night. However, more than 12 hours later I’m still waiting for the transactions to confirm, and yes, I share your question about ViaBTC’s business model for their accelerator.

One of the reasons they probably do it is because they get people coming to their site, there are all kinds of things on the page on how you can help them out in what they are doing, including donations to help out with that tx accelerator. Also they might prefer transactions that are from people who don’t send a lot of them at once, since they have a captcha. You do get this way bigger amount of single user transactions per block and therefor making Bitcoin scale to more users in a way. Since they prefer block increase for scaling purposes, this is quite possibly the case.

Or maybe they are just in the usual data business. Connecting Bitcoin addresses with IP addresses (and maybe more if their page has some tracking cookies), is unfortunately a widespread biz model ;-(. Not saying that they do that, I don’t know anything about them, but I am skeptical. And if they don’t sell the data they might exit some day and the new owner will be happy to exploit the data.

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Absolutely. Good point. Users should use tor for a better privacy. Good thing they don’t use CloudFlare (or at least not on default) to have a bit more annoying captchas for tor users, maybe the form doesn’t even require java script, so it could be quite compatible with the tor browser.

can the fixed fee be increased till the dynamic one can be implemented?

Unfortunately not because the change would break backwards compatibility. We’ll have to adjust trading habits until then, sorry.

Hi there, in the same boat with my transaction. More than 24 hours and 0 confirmations. I’ve opened a dispute as instructed.

Is there any way to get my BTC back soon?

The arbitrator will look into it and communicate in the support chat. Of course you get your BTC back in case the buyer has not sent the Fiat funds.

The offers have the current fee, so if there is an update with a higher fee those will break. It was a bad design when I implemented it ;-(, though fees have been double as high as usually needed back then…
If the blockchain spam goes on too long I will try to find an intermediate solution, but there is no easy one :frowning:

One thing I could probably do without big problems is to start the trade period timer only after the confirmation is there. As soon all update quickly that should not cause issues.

You have done great work Manfred. This trade volume has taken everyone by surprise. I think the dynamic/custom transaction fees will do the trick for future releases

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