What to do if your Bitcoin BTC transaction stuck freeze

[stevejoseph]

I don't use BTC anymore, but this will be helpful for those who use and if your Bitcoin transaction stuck / freeze / not confirmed.

This happened because the fees were too low. If you will not do anything the transaction will timeout eventually and fall out of the mempool. Currently, it's 336 hours when current Bitcoin BTC transaction will expire.

There are several other options for you:

• wait until the tx expires from the mempool (which should be soon given that it's been almost 2 weeks). I think the threshold in Core software is 2 weeks. Once that happens, try redoing the tx with a higher fee (consult actual fee charts and set a custom fee). If you wallet doesn't permit setting custom fees or if you don't have enough control over re-sending, import your seed into a better wallet to do the transaction. If you don't have the wallet seed or private key, then you're on a custodial wallet (i.e. others hold your keys) and this method won't work for you. Go to the next one.
• As long as the tx is still in the mempool and you own the key to the address the $170.00 were sent to, you can construct a child transaction (let's call it tx2) with a fee high enough to pay for both transactions. Then hope that it gets mined. This is called "Child Pays for Parent" (CPFP) and can be used to increase the effective fee of a parent transaction so that it goes through. Googling should deliver more info about the technicalities.
• If your original transaction was done with RBF (Replace By Fee) enabled, you should be able to increase the fee by re-doing it on a wallet that supports RBF. Again, this is only for a transaction that's still in the mempool and used RBF. It's doubtful your Coinbase wallet app supports this, otherwise the support should've mentioned it. So again, depends on whether you have the seed/keys and can import it into a better wallet that can do this.
• Search for Bitcoin transaction acceleration services. There used to be a few miners that offered a service to include low-fee transactions during times of congestion, if the user paid them a fee on the side using something else (credit card, or other crypto). You might just get lucky and find such a service, or it might not work. Unfortunately this gamble is unavoidable if none of the other 3 methods above work for you and you don't want to wait for the tx to expire from mempools.

Best way to avoid these problems altogether is to use Bitcoin Cash (BCH).

 

[stevejoseph]

Other alternative: import keys into an advanced wallet (Electrum? Sparrow?), create the high-fee transaction offline, get the hex and broadcast it to Blockchair.