How long are Bitcoin transactions taking right now?
Derick If you have sent a bitcoin payment in the last couple of weeks, you may have noticed that your transactions are taking much longer than expected to confirm.
We have received your emails.
Since, like the Bitcoin network, we are currently working through a backlog, we want to thank you for your patience. With the high volume of questions we're getting about delayed payments, we decided it would be best to write a short explanation about what's happening with many bitcoin transactions right now.
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How Bitcoin Transactions Get Confirmed (or Delayed)
Transactions on the Bitcoin network itself aren't controlled or confirmed by BitPay, but by the bitcoin miners which group transactions into "blocks" and add those blocks to the Bitcoin "blockchain" – the shared historical record of all transactions. When a transaction has been added to a block six blocks ago, it's considered a done deal.
Currently, bitcoin network traffic is unusually high due to increasing demand for transactions per block. Block sizes are limited, so this means that transactions which exceed the capacity for a block get stuck in a queue for confirmation by bitcoin miners. This queue of unconfirmed transactions is called the bitcoin mempool.
What To Do If You Have an Unconfirmed Transaction
If your bitcoin transaction to a BitPay merchant has not confirmed yet, you will need to wait for it to be confirmed by bitcoin miners. Since BitPay does not control confirmation times, there is unfortunately nothing we can do to speed up the process once your transaction has already been broadcast to the network.
You can check your transaction's confirmation status and other payment details on any blockchain explorer (like BitPay's block explorer Insight). Look up your transaction using your transaction ID or the sending or receiving bitcoin addresses, which can all be found in your bitcoin wallet that sent the payment. For your transaction to be considered fully confirmed by most BitPay merchants, your transaction will need to have six confirmations.
How To Avoid Delayed Transactions
Because block sizes are limited, it's important for bitcoin miners to know which transactions they should include in blocks first. Miners use prices to figure this out. When you broadcast a transaction, your total amount sent usually includes a "miner fee" which goes to pay miners.
If you want your transaction to leave the bitcoin mempool and be added to a block quickly, it's important that you include a sufficient miner fee. This is why we strongly suggest using the BitPay wallet or another true bitcoin wallet that can dynamically calculate the miner fee needed for timely block confirmations. For reference, the website bitcoinfees.21.co gives the minimum miner fee as 360 satoshis/byte, though this amount has been fluctuating throughout this week.
Transactions are being added to the bitcoin mempool's full queue constantly. Some may have been sent with higher miner fees than the one sent with your payment. This means that with current network traffic, miners may deprioritize your unconfirmed transaction even if it was sent with an appropriate fee at the time.
What Is BitPay Doing About This?
While BitPay does not control confirmation times on the Bitcoin network, we care about the payment frustrations BitPay merchants and purchasers are experiencing right now.
For purchasers, our BitPay wallet team has been working on updates to the BitPay wallet for our next release which will help to mitigate the effects of these delays on the bitcoin network when they occur.