Do your Bitcoin transactions get stuck sometimes? If so, have you thought what to do in such situations?
Over the years, transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain has increased exponentially which results in huge traffic on Bitcoin’s blockchain. Plus, the limited 1 Mb block size and increased spam from Bitcoin Cash support doesn’t help either.
Currently, the Bitcoin blockchain processes over 200,000 transactions a day but back in November 2017, it was processing over 300,000 that had resulted in the fees per transaction to skyrocket.
These transactions are assembled in a backlog pool called mempool from where miners pick-up transactions in the priority of transaction fees attached to it. Therefore, more the transaction fees attached to your transaction, higher are the chances to get included in the next block.
But this can be an awfully long wait if the blockchain is already crowded. In such a situation, to accelerate your transaction, you can use Bitcoin transaction accelerators which are mostly paid but can be free at times if you are lucky.
A Bitcoin transaction accelerator is nothing but an off-chain paid/free request to a mining pool to deliberately include that particular transaction in the next block despite its low transaction fee. This creates an offline fee market for the mining pools.
But it is a very useful option.
Because many people who have paid low transaction fees by mistake aren’t as well equipped in applying Replace by fees (RBF) or Child pays for parent (CPFP) techniques to accelerate their transactions in a traffic jam situation.
That’s why it is important to look at some of the services that facilitate acceleration of Bitcoin transactions.
3 Best Bitcoin Transaction Accelerators
1. ViaBTC
ViaBTC’s transaction accelerator is a FREE service for the Bitcoin community to accelerate the BTC transactions. It also runs paid services for accelerating Bitcoin transactions in case of emergencies, experiments or genuine low fee problems. There is no need for sign-up for using this accelerator. And to use this accelerator you need to submit any TXID of the delayed transactions that at least include a fee of 0.0001BTC/KB.
The ViaBTC mining pool doesn’t entertain transaction fees lower than this. Also, ViaBTC supports the acceleration of 100 FREE transactions per hour exceeding which you need to use their paid service.
What are you thinking of! If your transaction is stuck, fill in your TXID and start accelerating your transactions. You can find your Transaction ID in a format like this “073957ae2439ef7eeb8e962460386244f5339098d69cbc534c677716a7ed0528” by searching the Bitcoin address for your transaction at www.blockchain.info.
2. BTC.Com
BTC.com provides the service of Bitcoin transaction acceleration in cooperation with other mining pools. The fee structure was quite high in December 2017 but in general, the fee revolves around $5-$10. Through this service, one can increase the probability of confirming their transaction within 1 hour to 75% and within 4 hours to 98%.
If the transaction isn’t confirmed in 12hrs, the total fee will be refunded. But this policy is not applicable to the transactions which are removed or double-spent during the acceleration process. Here, you can see the fee estimations for a TXID that I have put for which the payment can be done in fiat or digital currencies.
Bitcoin Afterburner is a product by the same company that created the Sumourai wallet.
Bitcoin Afterburner is an open source wallet utility designed to get your stuck unconfirmed Bitcoin transactions confirmed as quickly as possible. Afterburner is like a first-aid kit for a sick transaction.
Simply import your existing Bitcoin wallet to review any stuck unconfirmed transactions in your wallet. It doesn’t matter whether you are sending the payment or receiving it, Afterburner works on almost all transactions in your wallet. Tap the stuck unconfirmed transaction, review and accept the new fees, and your stuck transaction should be confirmed in the next few blocks.
Bitcoin Afterburner is not a wallet but it is a Bitcoin transaction accelerator tool that accelerates Bitcoin transactions at a flat fee of $5.99 + miner fee which gets added to Child pays for parent (CPFP) transaction.
The app is available for Android devices and is compatible with all BIP 44 & BIP 39 wallets.
4. ConfirmTX
This is another cool Bitcoin transaction accelerator that allows you to accelerate your stuck Bitcoin transaction.
And the cool thing is that if your transaction size is less than 250 byte then you are not required to pay anything and SlushPool one of the biggest mining companies will mine your transaction for free.
But for +250 byte transactions, you will need to pay $5.
All transactions will be confirmed within 72 hours but in most cases, they are confirmed within 12 hours. They do not offer refunds and all sales are final. If your transaction is not confirmed within 72 hours we will credit you with a free future acceleration.
Conclusion
In my opinion, technological advancements like Afterburner that makes difficult processes like Replace by fees (RBF) or Child pays for parent (CPFP) easy for transaction acceleration are the way to go.
The other two ways where we harness the pooled power of mining pools is like creating a whole new fee market for the miners which is not very good for a long-term growth.
Apart from that, another easy and free way to accelerate your transaction is by using segwit enabled wallets because by using segwit, extra space to incorporate more transactions is created indirectly for other pending transactions which help in easing out the pressure from the Bitcoin’s blockchain.
Now its time to hear from you: Have your BTC transactions ever got stuck? What do you do in such situations? Do let us know in the comments below.
Do share this article with your network if you find it useful!
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