As the number of unconfirmed Bitcoin transactions keeps increasing, a lot of users are left frustrated either by paying very high fees or experiencing protracted delays in their transactions.
Most users are seeking ways to facilitate their already delayed transaction. Some patronize online services that claim to accelerate transaction confirmation, while others engage platforms that they believe would offer the opportunity to broadcast such transactions to the miner’s community.
Reasons for confirmation delays
In order to find a solution, the root cause of any given problem must be identified.
With a market capitalization of over $32 bln, and a daily trading volume of almost $1 bln it is obvious that there is a significant increase in the adoption of Bitcoin. This is reflected by the cryptocurrency reaching a new all-time high of $1,960 in price.
Despite the increased adoption and volume of transaction, the sudden hike in the rate of unconfirmed transaction raises interest from certain quarters.
While advising users on ways to effectively achieve transfer of value without frustrations, Blockchain Consultant, Timothy Suggs notes the possible reasons for the increased delays in the transaction.
Suggs tells Cointelegraph:
"Bitcoin transaction times are lagging right now for various reasons, one being exponential growth and acceptance of the platform and another being political reasons. By political I mean, there are actors in the system sending thousands of transactions to themselves in order to add leverage to the block size debate.”
How to speed up a transaction
However, Suggs notes that to speed up their transaction time users can increase their fee or engage in what can be referred to as a round trip. For example, if you are using an exchange like Poloniex or Bittrex, simply trade your Bitcoin for an asset like Expanse and send it to your destination.
“If Ethereum wasn't having similar transaction queues as Bitcoin I'd recommend that as an alternative as well, however, a couple of days ago the transaction backlog of ETH was over 3000 TX", he says.
Robert Kucharski, Bitcoin and cryptocurrency trader, upholds his confidence in Ethereum as an alternative. “The easiest way, in my opinion, to solve the issue by the community is to sell Bitcoins and use Ethereum,” says Kucharski.
Dynamic fees
For Jason Cassidy, President at Crypto Consultant, the only way users of Bitcoin can receive faster confirmation times for transactions all boils down to paying a fee. Cassidy notes that from the miners perspective, higher fees for the service they offer acts as an economic incentive to include a given transaction in an upcoming block.
Cassidy says:
“One way to ensure this takes place is to send transactions from a Bitcoin wallet that uses dynamic fees. If the priority on a certain transaction is high then you may wish to manually set a fee to ensure the miners pick up your transaction in the next block. In the end, it all comes down to your satoshi/byte fee ratio per Bitcoin transaction
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