Contents:
If not, it can take longer. In the past, people have waited days for the transaction to be complete. One thing to understand here is I am not trying to scare you. Instead, I am trying to tell you all the factors that affect transaction confirmation timings. But there have been cases, depending upon the fees and network load, where transaction confirmations have happened in less than 60 minutes. Here is the data and below is the chart for the same:. However, currently, the average time for the first Bitcoin transaction confirmation is about 20 minutes. Here is the average timing chart for the last 7 days:.
Moreover, you can reduce the transaction fee and shorten this time even more by using segwit enabled wallets.
Having said all this, have you wondered what the Bitcoin development team is doing to ease out the situation? Well, of course, they know that using currency for which one needs to wait for minutes to get confirmation is simply unacceptable. Hope you found this article insightful. Harsh Agrawal is the Crypto exchanges and bots experts for CoinSutra. He has a background in both finance and technology and holds professional qualifications in Information technology.
After discovering about decentralized finance and with his background of Information technology, he made his mission to help others learn and get started with it via CoinSutra. Your email address will not be published. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Notify me of new posts by email. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
CoinSutra was started in with the mission to educate the world about Bitcoin and Blockchain applications.
Bitcoin Mempool. Harsh Agrawal. An international speaker and author who loves blockchain and crypto world.
Join us via email and social channels to get the latest updates straight to your inbox. Related Posts. The two main factors influencing the transaction time are:. The more transactions that the network needs to process, the longer each transaction takes.
This is because there are only a finite number of miners to process each block and there are a finite number of transactions that can be included in a block. Miners on the Bitcoin network prioritize transactions by the fee that they receive for confirming them. Therefore, if you pay a higher fee , a miner is more likely to process your transfer which decreases the transaction time.
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. However, the recent popularity boom of Bitcoin has caused congestion on the network. The average time for one confirmation has recently ranged anywhere from 30 minutes to over 16 hours in extreme cases. Other community members debate that improvements such as Segregated Witness SegWit and the Lightning Network will speed up the network without having to increase the block sizes.
Think of your bitcoin as a collection of information tokens stored in a glass box. The public key is the label of your box—everyone knows this is your box and how much bitcoin your box contains.
Like a bank account routing number, your public key is shared so that people can send you money. By contrast, your private key is safely guarded; it is the only way to open your glass box of bitcoin.
Having access to the private key is akin to having control of the bank account, which is why people take great pains to prevent private keys from falling into the wrong hands. In sum, bitcoins are summaries of transaction information. Public keys allow you to possess that information. Private keys authorize you to send that value to another public key. Say that you want to give your friend Dave a generous birthday gift of five bitcoin 5 BTC. To do so, you need to use your private key to send a message to the public blockchain announcing this transaction.
This transaction message contains three parts:. This three-part transaction message is sent to the blockchain.
In short, miners solve complex math problems that create new signatures—an updated transaction history—for the transacted bitcoin. Unfortunately for Dave, this process does not occur instantaneously. In fact, bitcoin transactions are subject to delays ranging from a few minutes to a few days. This is because bitcoin requires miners to verify transactions. However, due to its rising popularity, the bitcoin network is often backlogged with transactions waiting to be lumped into a block. For an idea of the backlog, check out the current Bitcoin Mempool. Mining requires significant effort and technology, so bitcoin transactions are increasingly subject to additional fees.
A Satoshi is one hundred millionth of a bitcoin, per byte size of the transaction, which is usually over bytes. Transaction fees are usually set by the user creating the block of transaction data to be mined. These rates and their dependent wait times vary as traffic ebbs and flows.
For instance, you could pay satoshis per byte which is 0. Your transaction will thus take about minutes to be verified.
Alternatively, you could pay a higher fee—say, satoshis per byte—to have your transaction placed in the immediate queue or the next block to be mined. Your transaction will likely be completed in the next 10 minutes. Bitcoin is a user-based, peer-to-peer system, thus making the system prone to volatility and experimentation.