I have taken a Bitcoin offer, completed the transaction and paid in Euros. The bitcoins have been sitting in the Mempool for the last day and a half, waiting to be confirmed. At the moment the miners are only accepting the high fee transactions, and it does not look like the situation is going to change soon. I understand that after 2 weeks in the Mempool, all unconfirmed transactions are removed. I need to know what happens to the bitcoins at this point, and if there is any way that I can recover the bitcoins through Bisq mediation or by some other means.
In case mempools forget about that transaction (which can be way before 2 weeks depending on every particular BTC node configuration) that means that your btc stay where they were and that transaction just need to be resubmitted with higher fees.
If you check your own mempool or block explorers like mempool.space and that tx is not recognized yet, go to Keybase if resubmitting the tx is not available at your Bisq node.
Thank you MnM. This is only my 2nd transaction and the crypto world is still new to me. When you say “forget” about the transaction, what do you mean? I am trying to understand the rules built into the system. Looking at Johoe’s diagrams it appears that the low-fee transactions can stay in the mempool for a long time, and they are eventually picked up when the miners run out of high-fee transactions. I am unsure how and when your “forgetting” process kicks in.
I got lucky! A couple of hours ago, for quite a short time, the miners started digging into the 10 s/vb layer and I now have plenty of confirmations. I notice there are still about 50% transactions in the same fee layer that have not been confirmed and the transaction volume has shot up again, so I was one of the lucky ones. What do I learn from this? Maybe in the current high-volume climate, the Bisq default value of 10 is not realistic. My heart missed a couple of beats, but I am on track once again. Btw, Johoe’s diagrams are excellent for understanding the current volume/price relationship. and I will definitely consult them before the next transaction.
I think it helps to understand that each block there’s an auction where only the biggest bids are accepted. If the demand is high, the price will be high as well, and if your bid is not high enough your transaction won’t enter into a block.
The mempool is a list of transaction offering to enter into the blockchain, but only those with higher fees will be accepted. Every Bitcoin node has his own mempool and the rules to decide what transactions they kept and transmitted to other Bitcoin nodes are decided by each node. They can decide to forget transactions according to a certain rule, like time they had this transaction or a max total size of offers (if a block is 1mb, it doesn’t make much sense to store 100mb).
Anyway, I’m happy that your tx got a confirmation.
You can chose the fees to send BTC from your Bisq node to another address, but for trades, the sat/vbyte to pay mining fees are decided by Bisq nodes that get info from this blockchain explorer. www.mempool.space
Thanks - I have a lot to learn.