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Bitcoin-transactions processing speed

How transactions are processed¶

All the transfers made from one bitcoin-purse to another are made with some delay that depends mostly on two parameters: the fee and the bitcoin network’s congestion.

Transaction fee is assigned by a user himself and the amount is arbitrary. However, zero or too small amount may cause an unending delay so that the transaction won’t be accepted and the funds will be returned only a few weeks later.

After being sent to the network, a transaction goes to the list of unconfirmed transactions known as mempool, waiting to be confirmed and included to a new block. As the size of the block is fixed (about 1Mb) and the size of transaction in bytes may vary, these are the transactions the specific fee (fee amount in satoshi divided by bytes of data) of which is maximum that are included in the block first.

A transfer becomes successful in case it has several confirmations. The first one comes when the transaction is included to a block. The second one and all the following – after the block containing our transaction is followed by other newly-formed blocks and all the chain has been accepted by the network.

How to make transactions being processed faster¶

Popular bitcoin-purses usually recommend quite acceptable fees. However, due to the network’s congestion fluctuations (that is the total amount of all unconfirmed transactions at the moment) the transactions with the offered fees may be processed with unsatisfactory speed.

To speed up the processing of transactions an optimal fee may be measured by one’s own. To do this one needs to:

get the size of the transaction in bytes (shown in the parameters of the transaction in bitcoin-purse);
choose the amount of fee which provides the necessary transaction processing speed basing on the network’s statistics (e.g. https://bitcoinfees.earn.com )
calculate the fee

For example, for a transaction 350 bytes in size at 0:00 AM, January 25, the fee is:

to be included to the closest new block (in 25 minutes) not less than 0,81 mBTC (231s/B * 350B);
to be included to 1-9 block (in 2 hours) not less than 0,28 mBTC (81s/B * 350B).

When transferring funds to bitcoin-purses the services of WebMoney (the service for WMX funding and withdrawal, INDX internet-exchange, the Crypto section on the Exchanger service) propose to set an optimal fee. To calculate this amount an averaged value of the amount of transactions and a specific fee guaranteeing the transaction to be included to one of the closest 3-5 blockd is used.