Please if you find this post interesting, educative or entertaining, kindly support my work by leaving a tip down below. Thanks.
Bitcoin takes forever to transfer from one wallet to another.
Which is pretty ironic considering the problem it's trying to solve.
But bitcoin comes from a good place with its intentions, and if not for certain reasons, which you'd have fully understood by the end of this post, Bitcoin transfers would be pretty fast.
At least much faster than they are now.
Recently, I tried to transfer some amount of BTC from my Coinbase to my Blockchain wallet for some reasons.
It took me 54 minutes to do this.
Yes. 54 minutes.
Technically speaking, Bitcoin transactions are supposed to take only about 10 minutes to complete.
But because of
I. The amount of transactions happening on the block your transaction happens to be placed on, and
Ii. The fee placed on your transaction
It may take a lot longer than that.
See, the first reason occurs because there are a limited number of miners. Should the number of miners be unlimited that shouldn't be a problem.
And since there are a limited number of miners, it takes a limited amount of time to process each transaction on each 1MB block(Bitcoin cash attempts to fix this particular problem)
The second problem is brought about by the fact that miners need to run at a profit. So they take the bigger transactions first because those carry bigger fees.
So literally, if you were placed in a block where everyone is sending $100 worth of BTC and above, and you're only sending $10 worth, theoretically your order may never be fulfilled.
Image courtesy of coinsutra.com
But,should your transaction be stuck in a block full of larger transactions, your transaction is kept in the Bitcoin mempool. You can check out it's current state here, since all transactions are recorded on the Blockchain publically.
So, these scenarios in addition to other factors lead to an average processing time of.....wait for it.....1 hour for each transaction.
Although, this slow transaction problem is being addressed by projects such as the lightning network
But for now, just hope you're placed in a nice block, have a cup of coffee and wait for your bitcoin to arrive.
It's just one family guy episode away.
Please if you find this post interesting, educative or entertaining, kindly support my work by leaving a tip down below. Thanks.
