Transaction with highest fee, but stuck, what did I do wrong?

I recently sent btc that appears to be stuck (https://live.blockcypher.com/btc/tx/c131d65d933e343f852021830b833123de952c1857f264503388cf642655c457/)

The interesting thing is that I used a higher fee (4.5 sat/byte) which was the highest fee that Electrum's slider would support. I also notice that there are only two transactions in this block. Did I screw up? Is there any way that I can fix this?

Edit: Electrum says that I am only 0.12 MB from tip, however it has hovered around there without moving and sometimes increasing in size.

Jacob M.

Posted 2019-10-20T23:29:47.567

Reputation: 33

Answers

The hourly average fee when this question was posted was between 9 and 10 Satoshi per Byte (sat/B).

The latest TX's that I just randomly checked all had 10.03 sat/B fee which is higher than the 4.5 sat/B that you sent.

Transactions are at a hourly peak right now. Wait it out and it'll probably go through in the next couple of hours as the mempool empties.

I just noticed your TX went through and has 3 confirmations from the time I started replying to now. So I guess this is a closed issue.

Jose Fonseca

Posted 2019-10-20T23:29:47.567

Reputation: 541

Since transactions can be of different size, miners actually select transactions by fee rate (fee over size), not by absolute fees. – Murch – 2019-10-21T00:16:46.247

@Murch Yep. His was 4.5 sat/B and those I checked (the first few on that block I linked to) all were 10.xx sat/B. – Jose Fonseca – 2019-10-21T00:22:37.310

3Block #600283 had 18 transactions with fee rates below 3 sats/B, but that's not my point. The point I was trying to make was that the absolute fee a transaction paid is not a good metric to assess its priority, because paying 2200 sats for a 1100 byte transaction is a lower fee rate than paying 1674 satoshis for a 372 byte transaction. – Murch – 2019-10-21T00:31:38.840

@Murch OK, thanks for the suggestion I've reworded the answer. Let me know please if this is better. – Jose Fonseca – 2019-10-21T01:10:12.677

1Yeah, much better! Thanks for editing! – Murch – 2019-10-21T01:23:05.013

Your transaction paid a fee of 1674 satoshis for 372 bytes, or a fee rate of 4.5 satoshis per byte, which was a reasonable estimate in the past hour (via https://mempool.space/tv):

There was just a slow block with #600,283 taking 37 minutes to be found (via https://blockchair.com) and it looks like your transaction would have been exactly in that little blue corner above the dotted line.

Otherwise, four of the last six blocks were not even full, so if not for that slower block, it would have been included in the next block (via https://mempool.space/tv):

Should you do get a transaction stuck during a congestion phase sometime in the future, check out this canonical question: Why is my transaction not getting confirmed and what can I do about it?

Murch

Posted 2019-10-20T23:29:47.567

Reputation: 41 609