6 REASONS YOUR BITCOIN IS TAKING TOO LONG TO CONFIRM
When you make a Bitcoin transaction, it needs to be permitted by the network before it can be finalized. A Bitcoin transaction generally requires 6 authorizations from miners before it's processed. 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.
Though, the latest status bang of Bitcoin has caused jamming on the network. The period for one confirmation now has recently fluctuated anywhere from 30 minutes to about 16 hours in extraordinary cases.
The good news is that; a lot of people are attracted to using bitcoin for transactions. The bad news is that this network traffic may produce a delay of a few hours to a few days for some users and a wait time of weeks for a small number of users.
Now let's look at a few of the reasons why your bitcoin is taking too long to confirm.
1. WHEN THE NETWORK IS OVERLOADED: When a blockchain network experiences high traffic, it causes delays, excess transactions and also pushes up transaction fees as demand outshines supply and miners can choose what they process. Even if you put in a vigorous and high transaction fee, you might have to wait longer for your bitcoin to be confirmed.
2. NOT ENOUGH MINERS: While top-grade digital resources like Bitcoin always attract groups of miners, some standard cryptocurrencies might have spots where it's not gainful for miners to process transactions. Demand again might be more than supply, and that would cause slow transaction processing. The more miners that are working within the network, the more people will try to take your transaction into a block.
3. YOUR TRANSACTION FEE WAS SET TOO LOW: It's always a big mistake to not set enough fee for your transaction because the reason why a transaction won't confirm is that the miner's fee sent by the sender is too low. Merely setting a low transaction fee is not encouraging to get your transactions confirmed. The transaction might need to be sent over and over until a miner picks it up and confirm it. On the other hand, if you need the transaction to be established urgently and the transaction hasn't been sent, you can try sending the transaction again but this time; add a higher fee.
Let's just say; the higher your transaction fee, the faster your transaction will be confirmed.
4. IT IS STUCK IN THE MEMPOOL QUEUE: The Mempool is a special place where the network stores all the transactions in a queue. If the block size of 1 MB is not enough to cover all the transactions made during the ten minutes, some transactions will be left in the mempool.
Bitcoin transactions can be extremely slow and costly at times, hence the immense stress on making the sudden network work. When transactions are implemented, the funds are first sent to the Mempool where they wait to be processed by the miners. Before they're processed, transactions will not be verified on the blockchain as they can still be disallowed by the Mempool if the fees are set too low, therefore making it take longer time to be confirmed.
5. BLOCK PROPAGATION: When a miner realizes a new block, all other miners who are currently searching for the same block stop searching and grant it to other miners. They check if the block is valid and add it to their local copy of the blockchain. Block sizes are small, it's essential for bitcoin miners to know which transactions they should include in blocks first. So, this means that transactions which exceed the capacity for a block size will get stuck in a queue for confirmation by bitcoin miners.
6. BLOCK SIZE: Sometimes, the block size of a cryptocurrency can be improved to contain more transactions. Nevertheless, this can also make it slower. This is a big reason why the Bitcoin community prevented calls from the Bitcoin Cash crowd to increase bitcoin's block size from 1MB to 8MB. This allows for more transactions. However, even when the network balance is working, it sometimes takes miners up to four hours to generate a new block. Please note, that size matters.
CONCLUSION
Blocks are usually confirmed nearly every ten minutes. However, the network can presently only handle a definite quantity of transactions for each block. Each transaction has a specific size in bytes, and each block can only contain a certain number of bytes. When the network can't process fast enough, it produces a build-up of unverified transaction. The network, in the end, resolves everything within a day or thereabout.
Finally, your transactions will either be approved or disallowed, and the coins will return to your address like they were never sent.