Like many bitcoin holders, I've been obsessively checking the price the last few days as it has gone to the moon. I've been into bitcoin since early 2013, so I knew a correction was coming and wanted to sell some bitcoin before it did (I held through the last all time high and regretted not selling and re-buying lower).
Last night I decided to import one of my paper wallets to blockchain.info and then transfer it over to Gdax to play around with some trading. I was really surprised to see the suggested fee at over $5 for the transfer! I'm used to paying a few pennies or dimes at most. This is supposed to be bitcoin, not some bank wire transfer! (I foolishly told myself)
Against the multiple warnings of blockchain info's interface, I continued ahead with a fee of 0.0005 (which I still thought was high at $0.55). Here's where I made a newbie mistake.
Bitcoin fees are not arbitrary.
Miners get paid by working on blocks which include transactions with the highest fees. Each transaction has a size based on the number of inputs and outputs. Including small transactions with high fees is the best approach for them to remain profitable. My mistake was not thinking about how this address was one I used for mining back in the day. To transfer out of it requires 33 inputs! The size of the transaction is 5,973 Bytes! As you can see here, it's still unconfirmed after 13 hours and may remain so for quite some time:
With the price volatility, thousands of people are moving bitcoin around and the unconfirmed transaction count is now up over 36,000!
My transaction is probably somewhere near the bottom of the list.
Though I haven't done it before, I hear one way to push this along is to spend the coin in that output address using a high fee which will encourage miners to include the previous unconfirmed transaction. Unfortunately, since this address is owned by Gdax, that's not something I can do. For now, I'll just let it sit and see what happens.
Lesson learned: pay the fees.
There's a reason blockchain.info was suggesting such a high fee. They were thinking, I was not.
Additional lesson for those paying attention: bitcoin feels ancient compared to STEEM. 36k unconfirmed transactions compared to a blockchain which confirms in 3 seconds with no fees at all? Seriously. This isn't even like comparing betamax to VHS. This is like comparing a couple cans with some wax string to a Satellite phone.
I'm publishing my stupidity for your educational enlightenment. You might think after this failure (and my mining catastrophe melting 100 bitcoin) I'd be frustrated with bitcoin and cryptocurrency. Nope. I'm still as excited as ever because cryptographically secure money in the hands of individuals uncontrolled by governments and central banks is the future of stored value.
Anyone want to wager on when this transaction will actually confirm without intervention (if ever)?