Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Technical Support
Re: Why does this tx not get confirmed
by
digitx
on 28/10/2017, 18:46:50 UTC
The fee in order to complete a transaction varies on the Bitcoin network from time to time. There is effectively a backlog of transactions on the network caused by the fact that the current rate of finding a block and adding transactions from the mempool to the next block is limited.

Your transaction will be eventually be confirmed if/when the number of people sending Bitcoin slows or if everyone also sends transactions with a low fee like yours but if Bitcoin usage spikes and everyone is happier to pay higher transaction fees than you (in per byte terms) - it will potentially never be confirmed.

There is a possibility that as Bitcoin nodes go offline and come back on that the rate of mempool synchronisation drops and your transaction gets lost and expires - or that the Bitcoin devs update the clients to kick transactions over a certain age from the mempool but I think that is more unlikely.

In fact your question is what has sparked the whole block size debate. If blocks were bigger - you could process more transactions in them and confirmation times would be reduced.

There is more information on the proposed solutions in the following links. 
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Block_size_limit_controversy
https://www.coindesk.com/explainer-what-is-segwit2x-and-what-does-it-mean-for-bitcoin/
https://medium.com/@olivierjanss/the-solution-to-the-block-size-debate-42c3814ff481
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin_scalability_problem

Good luck!