Why would a transaction take 90 minutes to get confirmed?

1

I'm just starting out with alt-coins, and have executed a few transactions with both bitcoin and dogecoin and they all seem to "go through" in less than a minute. I've transferred small amounts between wallets (my own) done some gambling and everything seems to transact within 2 minutes tops.

I just made a small deposit to cryptsy and it took 90 minutes to get confirmed. I'm wondering why it took so long this time. (FWIW I do have 3 wallets up right now, Bitcoin-QT, Multibit, and Dogecoin-QT, if that matters.) My network connection seems to be working normally.

My wallet indicated it was confirming (1 of 6, 2 of 6, etc.) and I've never seen that before.

Any clues, anyone?

obelia

Posted 2014-03-08T19:10:23.067

Reputation: 316

Cryptsy probably required 6 confirmations. With Bitcoin, it may take an hour or more for 6 confirmations. – ChrisW – 2014-03-08T20:38:57.140

@Murch I sent 0.01 bitcoin to test. Definitely took more than 90+ minutes. – obelia – 2014-03-08T21:59:40.370

@ChrisW - Thanks. I didn't know different places required more/less confirmations. Learning. – obelia – 2014-03-08T22:00:34.900

@ChrisW That seems to be a likely answer. As in, put that in an answer, not a comment. ;) – Murch – 2014-03-08T22:02:13.070

@Murch It took 90 minutes for my wallet to indicated confirmed (with the green checkmark) and for it to show in my Cryptsy account. My wallet indicated the confirm count, to 6, as it went, I've never seen that before. – obelia – 2014-03-08T22:03:08.910

On occasion, deposis I've sent to Cryptsy start confirming immediately but take thousands of confirmations (1-2 days) for them to appear in my Cryptsy account. According to their support, that happens when they have way too much deposit/withdraw operations :( – Joe Pineda – 2014-03-09T02:49:12.303

Answers

3

Bitcoin has longer confirmation times than many altcoins like Litecoin or Dogecoin, and different services make their own choices about how many confirmations to require before a deposit is made available for use.

While you can see a new transaction on the network almost instantly, many services require six confirmations to prevent double-spending. With Bitcoin, six confirmations will commonly require an hour and perhaps more if no transaction fee was added.

Given the description, it leads me to believe that Cryptsy wanted to see six confirmations before making your deposit available to you on the Cryptsy site. It's not really unusual to see that take the 90 minute wait you experienced.

ChrisW

Posted 2014-03-08T19:10:23.067

Reputation: 840

Also Worth Mentioning network propagation, and that the speed of transactions can also be affected by what peers you are connected to and how they have their systems configured. E.G. a mining pool with more bandwidth may accept a greater variety of transactions and more transactions without fee's however smaller pools may configure options such as: -blockminsize=<n> -blockmaxsize=<n> -mintxfee=<m.n> In order to optimize their throughput for the most efficient use of their resources. The servers that pools run on will aslo impact this as RAM and CPU also play a key role here. – hafnero – 2014-03-09T14:27:21.670

Asked: 2014-03-08T19:10:23.067

Viewed: 613 times

Active: 2014-03-09T01:52:54.663