Top Reasons Behind Delayed Bitcoin Transactions

Delayed transaction confirmation is often a serious issue faced by Bitcoin users, both the senders and the recipients. The delay in confirming Bitcoin transactions happens because a new block is created and added to the blockchain network after every 10 minutes through mining. Therefore, there is always congestion in the network, and this issue is faced by both the sender as well as the recipient of the Bitcoins. For example, whenever a person sends coins to another person, it will stay as an unconfirmed transaction in the network until and unless a new block is created and added to the network after verification of the transaction is done. 

Therefore, if the network remains congested, it will be more affected by transaction confirmation delays. However, if you want to get a quick confirmation for your Bitcoin transactions, you will need to pay high transactional fees depending on the overall pending transactions. Bitcoin is the most popular digital currency but sometimes there might be delay in the Bitcoin Transaction. And if you are planning to invest or trade in Bitcoin you need to understand how Bitcoin works and other facts about Bitcoin. Here is an innovative way to trade Bitcoin, Bitcoin Pro, which is an automatic trading platform that works on smart trading algorithms that makes trades on the crypto market on behalf of its users. If you want to know more about this you can check out Bitcoin Pro Reviews before trading in Bitcoin.

But what causes a delay in the Bitcoin transactions? Here are some of the reasons for the pending Bitcoin transactions discussed in detail. 

Reasons Behind Bitcoin Transaction Delay

1. Transaction fees set too low

As stated earlier, one of the possible reasons for Bitcoin transaction delays might be that you have set the transaction fee too low for the Bitcoin miners to pick up your transaction. This is because a lower transaction fee means that the miners receive a little incentive to verify your transaction. Hence, the delay in confirming your transaction, without which your transaction will not be recorded in the blockchain network. 

2. Spam and dusting attacks can also subject to slow down the network

Spam attacks are quite common in leading cryptocurrency blockchains like Bitcoin or Litecoin. In a spam attack, a bad actor continuously sends loads of minute low-fees transactions from one address to another to slow down the network. These are commonly known as spam attacks and are used by rival projects to drive users away.

On the contrary, dusting attacks involve hackers who send a minuscule crypto amount worth less than a fraction of a cent to multiple public addresses to glean information about the owners they can later use in phishing attacks. 

3. Network Congestion

Network congestion happens when the network is overloaded with transactions, that it cannot process transactions fast enough resulting in delays in confirming transactions. Thus, when there is an increasing demand for transactions per block due to high traffic, the network transaction will take time to process and validate before they are added to the blockchain network.

4. Block validation and size

Often the limited block size limits the number of transactions to be processed, which causes further delay in confirming the transactions. The “n” number of unconfirmed transactions lying in the queue do not fit in the space of each blockchain block, which is 1 megabyte in most cases. On a positive note, the limited space of each block protects the data from DDoS attacks.

However, the block size can be increased if you want to accommodate more transactions in them, making the network even slower. Therefore, most exchanges are against the proposal to increase the block size from 1 MB to 8 MB. 

5. Mempool Bloat or Slow Internet Speed

When any transaction is executed, the funds are first sent to the Mempool, where they wait until the Bitcoin miners process them. The transactions are only recorded on the blockchain after they are processed; the Mempool can still reject them if the transaction fees are set too low. 

Once the transactions are confirmed, they are recorded on the blockchain and then posted to the history page. The queue of the pending Bitcoin transactions in the blockchain network is known as the Bitcoin Mempool. The Mempool is verified by the Bitcoin miners and is stressful for both the sender and the recipient.

Due to the high congestion in the blockchain network during mining, crypto miners are often located in remote and rural areas where internet connections are slow. Therefore, make sure that the Internet speed is decent when sending funds to avoid delay in confirmation of your bitcoin transactions.

Wrap Up

If your transaction is taking time to confirm, you have nothing else to do other than just wait. Most transactions get the confirmation within a day or two, but that would again depend on the block’s size and network congestion. Your transactions will either be confirmed or will expire (in rare cases) and returned to your wallet. 

Adding a sufficient “miner fee” sometimes helps prevent the delay because when a user broadcasts a transaction, the total amount sent includes the “miner fee” that goes to the bitcoin miners. 

Therefore, adding a sufficient miner fee will encourage the bitcoin miners to choose your transaction first from the Mempool and include them in the block. And after the miners verify the transactions, they will be added to the blockchain, implying the transactions’ confirmation.