A How to send Bitcoin from an exchange. Sending Bitcoins from an exchange is by far the easiest method. And Coinbase is the easiest of the easy: all you need to do is send your Bitcoins from your Coinbase account to your recipient's email address (the one associated with his/her Coinbase account). Source: coinbase.com. That's why the current BTC transaction time can take from 10 minutes to 4-6 hours for operations to be confirmed on the blockchain, depending on the Bitcoin blockchain congestion at the time you initiate your transaction. How long does it take to send cryptocurrency? Cointree processes all cryptocurrency transfers instantly and the destination will notice the transfer incoming almost immediately. When sending your cryptocurrency to another service or wallet, they may wait for the transfer to become confirmed by the miners/network before accepting it as complete. The average time it takes to mine a block is 10 minutes, so you would expect a transaction to take around an hour on average. However, the recent popularity boom of Bitcoin has caused congestion on the network. The average time for one confirmation has recently ranged anywhere from 30 minutes to over 16 hours in extreme cases.
It is an open secret that Bitcoin block time is 10 minutes.
But have you wondered why it takes more than 10 minutes to confirm a Bitcoin transaction successfully?
I guess you haven't !!
I know you are a busy man (or woman), but since many times, receivers of Bitcoin have been fooled due to their lack of knowledge on this simple topic.
That's why I think it is my responsibility to make you aware and make sure that you don't fall for such silly mistakes again.
So in this post, we are going to learn what's the ideal Bitcoin transaction/confirmation time and what to do when the transactions are stuck for long hours?
So let's dive right into it:
What Is Bitcoin Transaction Confirmation Time?
For those of you who don't know:
Bitcoin transactions are not instantly confirmed or finalized.
These transactions first go to a pool of unconfirmed transactions called Bitcoin mempool from where miners pick up these transactions. That's why one needs to wait for atleast 10 minutes to get the first confirmation for a Bitcoin transaction.
In any case, the average time a Bitcoin transaction takes for confirmation is 10 minutes, and that's because the Bitcoin's block timing is 10 minutes.
But this isn't true every time because your Bitcoin transaction confirmation can take up to several hours and sometimes even days after you have made a transaction.
Think I am exaggerating?
Well, I am not !!
This can happen due to many factors and those factors we are going to discuss in the next section.
What Determines Bitcoin Transaction Speed or Bitcoin Transfer Time?
The speed of Bitcoin transactions depends on many factors and out of those, these two factors are very critical to BTC transfer time:
- Congestion on Bitcoin's network
- Bitcoin transaction fees attached to each BTC transaction.
The congestion or load of Bitcoin's blockchain can be seen in real-time by monitoring the mempool. At the time of writing these many unconfirmed transactions are present on the network.
But needless to say, more the number of unconfirmed transactions the more time blockchain will take to confirm them.
After all, we have limited space and limited throughput on the chain as it can only include 1 MB worth of transactions every 10 minutes.
And due to Bitcoin's design, only one miner can add a block every 10 minutes, no matter how much mining hash power he/she has. (See our guide on Bitcoin Mining)
Moreover, miners are bound to act in a way that incentivizes them the most and in case of mining these miners prefer to take those transactions first that have more transaction fees attached to it.
If you don't know:
Miners receive 12.5 BTC plus the ‘X' amount of Block mining fee for their mining work. And if you see, here that 12.5 BTC reward is fixed for all the miners, but ‘X' amount of block mining fees varies.
So the higher the ‘X' amount, the higher the income/reward for miners to mine a successful block.
I know you are thinking, how block mining fee is related to your transaction not getting picked from the mempool?
Well, for that let's understand, block mining fee first,
Block is merely a collection of transactions, and each transaction has a transaction fee attached to it. And the sum of the transaction fees attached to individual transactions that a miner has taken into his block is called ‘Block mining fee.'
So assume for a moment that you are a Bitcoin miner. Betonline.
What would you do?
Well, if I am a miner, I would try to maximize the ‘X' amount by always picking up those transactions from the mempool which has higher transaction fees attached to it so that I can get more block mining fees as a reward.
Hence it makes economic sense for the miners to pick up those transactions first from the mempool which has higher fees attached to it.
And miners are quite proactive in this, as all the miners keep their mempool in descending order of transaction fees (bitcoin mempool fees) attached to it.
That's one of the main reasons for your Bitcoin confirmations taking hours and being stuck in the mempool as your fee is too little to be noticed by the miners.
How Many Bitcoin Confirmations Are Enough On A Transaction?
Generally speaking, ‘6 confirmations' are recommended and that many considered enough to make sure a Bitcoin transaction is successful.
This ‘6 confirmation' limit is even advised by Satoshi Nakamoto- the creator of Bitcoin because after six confirmations the receiver can be sure that the bitcoins he/she has received aren't double-spent.
But as we know that a Bitcoin confirmation will minimum take 10 minutes and hence for six confirmations one needs to wait atleast 60 minutes (provided the transaction is included in the very next block)
But this is an ideal scenario that is often different from reality because there are enough chances that your transaction will not be included in the very next block.
Here is the median time for a transaction to be accepted into a mined block and added to the public ledger (note: only includes transactions with miner's fees).
Here is the overall average confirmation time on Bitcoin's blockchain:
Also, these confirmations are nothing but the number of blocks added after your transaction is included on the chain and first confirmation means your transaction is included in the most recent block mined.
And as the blocks are found after the recently mined block, the confirmation count for your transaction will keep on increasing to ‘6 confirmations' or more. Check this transaction now and you will able to see more than 6 confirmations on it: 3230b0b9c0bd5cd196cc23b1e5bf4b41604b31e04bc9d9f5071cfa8117ba70a9
Is There Any Bitcoin Transaction/Confirmation Time Calculator/Estimator?
Yes, of course, there are some Bitcoin transaction time estimators that you can use, but they all rely on the Bitcoin transaction fees you have attached to that particular transaction.
So let say you have attached ‘X' Satoshis/byte of fees for a Bitcoin transaction then you can very well calculate how much time (or how many blocks) you will need to wait before getting the first confirmation.
See this estimator that tells you based on the Satoshi/byte fees, how much time and how many blocks one needs to wait:
So as per this estimator, if you are using 14 Satoshis/byte of fees or more, you will get included in the next immediate block, and in less than 30 minutes you will receive your confirmation.
Whereas if you use 3 Satoshis/byte of fees, then you might get included in the second block and if the fees are lower than that you might need to wait for 3-4 blocks more to get included in a Bitcoin's block.
So this way you can easily calculate your approximate Bitcoin confirmation time and know exactly how long does Bitcoin takes to transfer?
What To Do When Bitcoin transactions taking a long time?
But, I use this time estimator before I am making my transaction because that way I can determine appropriate transaction fees and hence reduce the expected time of confirmation.
I have explained this method very comprehensively in my article on, ‘A Beginner's Guide To Bitcoin Transaction Fees For Fast Confirmations.'
I also know that you want to know, what needs to be done when your transaction is stuck for a long time.
Actually, there are a couple of things that you can do when your transaction is stuck, such as:
- Use a Bitcoin transaction accelerator to bump the fees off-chain.
- Replace your stuck transaction with higher a fee through Replace-By-Fees method.
- Make a child transaction with higher fees using Child Pays For Parent technique.
Of course, these techniques are specific to Bitcoin and are to be used when your transaction is stuck for many hours.
But on the flip side, if you don't have the technical competency to do these things then you can leave your transaction for 72 hours and the network will automatically drop your transaction and return your coins in your Bitcoin wallet.
Conclusion: How long does bitcoin transfer take?
Now, I know you must be thinking if that's how long do Bitcoin transactions take, then how could it be used as a currency?
Well, that's what Bitcoin developers also think, and that's why they are working on technologies like Segwit, Schnorr Signatures, & Lightning network to make Bitcoin transactions nearly instantaneous.
But there is a long road towards that as Lightning network has recently started getting traction from the community and Segwit's penetration has also increased.
And I believe that when these technologies are at its full throttle, questions like ‘how long do bitcoin transactions take to confirm?' or ‘how long does Bitcoin transfer take?' will become a thing of the past.
But as of now, if you want to transact on Bitcoin's main chain, you need to wait for atleast 60 minutes before being able to claim that your transaction is 100% successful.
So that's all from me today in this guide on Bitcoin transaction time, and I shall be back very soon with more such interesting and knowledgeable topics around Bitcoin.
Untill that time keep learning and keep sharing the Bitcoin love with TheMoneyMongers
And do share this article with your friends through your social media !!
Contents
- What Is Bitcoin Transaction Confirmation Time?
- What To Do When Bitcoin transactions taking a long time?
Learn about bitcoin fees..
Bitcoin is made up of blocks. Blocks are a set of transactions, and currently restricted to be less than or equal to 1,000,000 bytes and designed so that on average only 1 block per ~10 minutes can be created. The groups the create blocks are known as bitcoin miners. These miners can pick which ever transactions they want in the block they create.
Bitcoin miners get paid all the transaction fees in the block they mine. So as such, it is in their interests to maximize the amount of money they make when they create a block. So what they do is pick the 1,000,000 bytes of transactions that results them getting paid the most money.
From a bitcoin miner perspective, they don't care of the value of a transaction, but just the size (amount of bytes), because they are only allowed to create blocks of 1,000,000 bytes or less. So miners don't consider the absolute fee a transaction has, but rather, the fee per byte.
Why are the fee estimations so high?
Eye-balling it, sometimes it looks like the fee estimates are super high. The reason for that is because they use 95% confidence. If a block was found now maybe you'd only need 20 satoshi/byte, but it might be an hour before the next block and in the subsequent time a large amount of new transactions come in.
Sometimes you don't need such high confidence (e.g. it's not important, or you have a way of fee bumping), so you can get away with much lower fees.
How Long Does It Take Bitcoin To Send Someone
Why are Bitcoin fees so high?
Sometimes fees are high when there is a lot of demand for blockspace. Remember that there can be only so many transactions per block. And there is a sort of auction that occurs to determine who's transactions make it in and who's don't. If there are a lot of people who really need to get into the next block, they will pay for the privilege. Wait for demand to die down and fees will be almost 0.
Why do some low-fee paying transactions appear early in the mempool?
It's because a high-fee paying transaction depends on it, and reprioritizes it. i.e. the only way for the miner to get the money from the 'good' transaction, is include a 'bad' one first. It's known as Child-Pays-For-Parent (CPFP), but note that some old versions of bitcoin core, and bitcoin unlimited don't support it (and leave those transactions for smarter miner software).
Do you have historical data?
Nope. But https://bitcoinfees.github.io/ does
How did you build this?
The fee estimates are simply generated by calling estimatesmartfee $n on bitcoin core (0.16.0). The chart is generated by dumping the mempool and doing some smart sorting.
A Lowdown on Bitcoin Fees
The Bitcoin website lists fast peer-to-peer transactions, worldwide payments, and low processing fees as the most important features of the cryptocurrency. Not surprisingly, Bitcoin has become extremely popular as a way to send money digitally across the globe as it solves critical problems faced by transactions executed in fiat currencies.
So this way you can easily calculate your approximate Bitcoin confirmation time and know exactly how long does Bitcoin takes to transfer?
What To Do When Bitcoin transactions taking a long time?
But, I use this time estimator before I am making my transaction because that way I can determine appropriate transaction fees and hence reduce the expected time of confirmation.
I have explained this method very comprehensively in my article on, ‘A Beginner's Guide To Bitcoin Transaction Fees For Fast Confirmations.'
I also know that you want to know, what needs to be done when your transaction is stuck for a long time.
Actually, there are a couple of things that you can do when your transaction is stuck, such as:
- Use a Bitcoin transaction accelerator to bump the fees off-chain.
- Replace your stuck transaction with higher a fee through Replace-By-Fees method.
- Make a child transaction with higher fees using Child Pays For Parent technique.
Of course, these techniques are specific to Bitcoin and are to be used when your transaction is stuck for many hours.
But on the flip side, if you don't have the technical competency to do these things then you can leave your transaction for 72 hours and the network will automatically drop your transaction and return your coins in your Bitcoin wallet.
Conclusion: How long does bitcoin transfer take?
Now, I know you must be thinking if that's how long do Bitcoin transactions take, then how could it be used as a currency?
Well, that's what Bitcoin developers also think, and that's why they are working on technologies like Segwit, Schnorr Signatures, & Lightning network to make Bitcoin transactions nearly instantaneous.
But there is a long road towards that as Lightning network has recently started getting traction from the community and Segwit's penetration has also increased.
And I believe that when these technologies are at its full throttle, questions like ‘how long do bitcoin transactions take to confirm?' or ‘how long does Bitcoin transfer take?' will become a thing of the past.
But as of now, if you want to transact on Bitcoin's main chain, you need to wait for atleast 60 minutes before being able to claim that your transaction is 100% successful.
So that's all from me today in this guide on Bitcoin transaction time, and I shall be back very soon with more such interesting and knowledgeable topics around Bitcoin.
Untill that time keep learning and keep sharing the Bitcoin love with TheMoneyMongers
And do share this article with your friends through your social media !!
Contents
- What Is Bitcoin Transaction Confirmation Time?
- What To Do When Bitcoin transactions taking a long time?
Learn about bitcoin fees..
Bitcoin is made up of blocks. Blocks are a set of transactions, and currently restricted to be less than or equal to 1,000,000 bytes and designed so that on average only 1 block per ~10 minutes can be created. The groups the create blocks are known as bitcoin miners. These miners can pick which ever transactions they want in the block they create.
Bitcoin miners get paid all the transaction fees in the block they mine. So as such, it is in their interests to maximize the amount of money they make when they create a block. So what they do is pick the 1,000,000 bytes of transactions that results them getting paid the most money.
From a bitcoin miner perspective, they don't care of the value of a transaction, but just the size (amount of bytes), because they are only allowed to create blocks of 1,000,000 bytes or less. So miners don't consider the absolute fee a transaction has, but rather, the fee per byte.
Why are the fee estimations so high?
Eye-balling it, sometimes it looks like the fee estimates are super high. The reason for that is because they use 95% confidence. If a block was found now maybe you'd only need 20 satoshi/byte, but it might be an hour before the next block and in the subsequent time a large amount of new transactions come in.
Sometimes you don't need such high confidence (e.g. it's not important, or you have a way of fee bumping), so you can get away with much lower fees.
How Long Does It Take Bitcoin To Send Someone
Why are Bitcoin fees so high?
Sometimes fees are high when there is a lot of demand for blockspace. Remember that there can be only so many transactions per block. And there is a sort of auction that occurs to determine who's transactions make it in and who's don't. If there are a lot of people who really need to get into the next block, they will pay for the privilege. Wait for demand to die down and fees will be almost 0.
Why do some low-fee paying transactions appear early in the mempool?
It's because a high-fee paying transaction depends on it, and reprioritizes it. i.e. the only way for the miner to get the money from the 'good' transaction, is include a 'bad' one first. It's known as Child-Pays-For-Parent (CPFP), but note that some old versions of bitcoin core, and bitcoin unlimited don't support it (and leave those transactions for smarter miner software).
Do you have historical data?
Nope. But https://bitcoinfees.github.io/ does
How did you build this?
The fee estimates are simply generated by calling estimatesmartfee $n on bitcoin core (0.16.0). The chart is generated by dumping the mempool and doing some smart sorting.
A Lowdown on Bitcoin Fees
The Bitcoin website lists fast peer-to-peer transactions, worldwide payments, and low processing fees as the most important features of the cryptocurrency. Not surprisingly, Bitcoin has become extremely popular as a way to send money digitally across the globe as it solves critical problems faced by transactions executed in fiat currencies.
In fact, the number of Bitcoin transactions has been consistently rising this year. The third quarter saw 20 million Bitcoin transactions being executed, up from 17.6 million during the second quarter. What's more, the number of Bitcoin transactions has increased at the rate of at least 5% month-over-month since February 2018.
This growth can be attributed to the drop in the average transaction fees on the Bitcoin network, which was earlier proving to be a hindrance in the way of the adoption of this cryptocurrency.
A brief history of Bitcoin fees
CNBC reported in December 2017 that users were paying $28 on an average to transact using Bitcoin. There was one Twitter user who claimed that he had to incur $16 worth of fees to send $25 worth of Bitcoin from one address to another, while another journalist had to spend $15 to send $100 worth of Bitcoin from a digital wallet to a hardware wallet. In fact, the average Bitcoin transaction fee had shot up to $55 in the third week of December last year, according to BitInfoCharts
How Long Does It Take To Send Bitcoin Through Coinbase
However, the average Bitcoin transaction fee has come down rapidly since then. BitInfoCharts reveals that the average Bitcoin transaction fee had dropped to just $0.50 in the first half of November 2018, which is probably why users are transacting more in Bitcoin to send and receive payments across the globe. But what has caused such a massive drop in the average Bitcoin transaction fees? To find out, we will first have to understand why Bitcoin fees are charged.
The economics behind Bitcoin fees
A Bitcoin transaction has to be added to the Blockchain in order to be successfully completed. However, for a transaction to be added to the Blockchain, it first needs to be validated by miners who solve a complex mathematical problem to verify the transaction. These miners spend a lot of computing power and energy when verifying a block of transactions from the Bitcoin Mempool (short for memory pool), which contains unconfirmed transactions waiting to be added to a block for confirmation.
Now, miners need to be incentivized for the time, effort, and resources that they are putting in to validate the unconfirmed transactions. As a result, they are given a fee of 12.5 BTC to successfully mine a block, but this is just one of the incentives on offer. Miners also earn a transaction fee that's selected by the sender in a Bitcoin transaction for their effort as they play a critical role in keeping the network secure.
What drives transaction fees?
Each block of transactions on the Blockchain cannot contain more than 1 megabyte of information, so miners can only include a limited number of transactions in each block. This is why miners prioritize those transactions where they have the potential to earn higher transaction fees.
So, if the mempool is full, users looking to get their transactions through will compete on fees. They will push up the fee in a bid to get their transaction included into the next block that's set to be mined. So, the Mempool bottleneck plays an important role in determining the transaction fee, though this isn't the only aspect affecting this metric.
The transaction size also has a role to play in the fee determination. As miners can only include select transactions within the 1 megabyte block, they prefer selecting small transaction sizes because they are easier to confirm. Transactions occupying more space, on the other hand, need more work for validation so they need to carry a higher fee in order to be included in the next block.
So, there are two factors determining transaction fees -- network congestion and transaction size -- and they also play a critical role in the time taken for a transaction to be confirmed. For instance, if a user sends a transaction with very low fees attached to it and the Bitcoin Mempool is full, then miners won't prefer picking that transaction because of the low incentive involved. In such cases, it could take several hours for the transaction to be confirmed.
However, if a user is willing to pay a higher transaction fee, then the first confirmation could arrive in 10 minutes, which is the time taken to mine a block. The Bitcoin community requires six such confirmations for a transaction to be completely validated. This means that if there's no network congestion and the fee attached is high, then the transaction should be successfully processed in an hour.
The future of Bitcoin fees
Earlier we saw that Bitcoin fees have dropped rapidly over the past year, spurring a growth in the number of transactions. This can be attributed to the smaller Bitcoin Mempool size. However, in case the number of unconfirmed transactions increases at a faster pace than the rate at which new blocks are mined, there will be network congestion. This is when the average Bitcoin transaction fees will go up.
This is the scalability problem faced by Bitcoin thanks to the limited number of nodes. However, the community is coming up with ways to circumnavigate this issue so that numerous transactions are executed quickly with low fees. Earlier this year, a user was able to carry out 42 transactions using the Lightning Network and spent just 4.9 cents in transaction costs.
The Lightning Network is a second-layer payment protocol on top of the Bitcoin blockchain that's capable of conducting a high volume of transactions at speed by reducing the on-chain load. As such, there's a good chance that the average Bitcoin transaction fees will remain low going forward thanks to the development of such payment protocols, thereby boosting the adoption of this cryptocurrency as a means of digital payments.
