Have you ever experienced a Bitcoin transaction getting stuck, causing you to wait for your bitcoins to arrive in the wallet for several hours? Have you ever wondered why your BTC takes longer than 10 minutes to arrive?
Most of us have been there, but how many of us have attempted to find a solution?
I’ll walk you through the whole process in this post, so you can see how long it takes and why it takes so long to move bitcoins between wallets.
Do Bitcoin transactions require a considerable amount of time?
The processing time for a Bitcoin transaction can vary from 1 minute to 60 minutes, sometimes even longer.
To understand how Bitcoin’s transaction time is influenced, it is imperative to know what factors affect it. The two most significant factors are:
- Bitcoin’s network is experiencing a high load
- A BTC transaction involves a fee
Bitcoin’s blockchain processes thousands of transactions each day. This is the load on the network. Unsurprisingly, the higher the number of transactions, the longer it will take to process each one. In a Bitcoin block size of 1 Mb there are only a limited number of miners and a limited number of transactions. See our exclusive guide on mining bitcoin for more information about miners.
Also, miner’s prioritize transactions with higher fees in the 1 Mb blocks, based on the fee attached to the transaction. Unless you have a very small transaction fee, your transaction can theoretically be delayed indefinitely. That is the main reason for the delay.
Investing in Bitcoin: The Truth About The Transaction Time
Additionally, Bitcoin blocks can only be mined within a fixed time period of ten minutes, in addition to the two constraints mentioned above. Your transaction will only be included if it falls within that time frame. Unless it is confirmed, your transaction remains unconfirmed in the Bitcoin mempool.
The first confirmation will be received in 10 minutes and another five will follow in 50 minutes, assuming your transaction is mined and included in the block.
BTC transactions are considered successful when at least 6 confirmations have been received.
Because of this, Bitcoin transfers to a Bitcoin wallet will take at least 60 minutes. The wait may be a bit longer. The wait may be a bit longer. Transaction confirmations have occurred in less than 60 minutes depending on the fees and network load.
Presently, the average time to confirm a Bitcoin transaction is about 20 minutes.
So, with all that said, do you wonder what the Bitcoin development team is doing to help ease the situation?
Obviously, they know that waiting 30-60 minutes to get confirmation for currency is simply unacceptable. In order to make Bitcoin transactions almost instantaneous using solutions such as Segwit, Schnorr signatures, and lightning networks, they are working on such solutions.