Factors Affecting the Speed of Transactions in the Bitcoin Network:
The speed of a transaction in the Bitcoin network depends on three factors:
- Transaction size — A transaction in the Bitcoin network is a set of binary data that includes information about where it came from (number of inputs) and where it is going (number of outputs).
- Fee — the fee you pay to miners for processing and including your transaction in a block.
- Network congestion — it often happens that due to a sharp increase in the exchange rate, everyone starts sending transactions, and the Bitcoin network gets “clogged,” fees rise, and many transactions simply get stuck.
Why is it impossible to accurately calculate the confirmation time of a transaction?
The problem of calculating the confirmation time of a transaction mainly lies in the inconsistency of the period when new blocks are created. If blocks were created exactly every 10 minutes (even with an error margin of 1-2 minutes), it would be possible to relatively accurately estimate the time when a transaction would have 1 confirmation. In reality, Bitcoin blocks can be created within a period ranging from 1 minute to 2 hours, and the number of new transactions during this period can increase significantly, greatly increasing the network load.
Even when sending a transaction with a high fee, no one can be sure that in 10-20 minutes this fee will still be relevant. Anyone can find themselves in this situation: both the sender and the receiver. When using Bitcoin, it is important to understand how the network works and accept its rules.
How to calculate the approximate time of receipt of a Bitcoin transaction?
If you have sent a transaction and it has not yet been confirmed, it is most likely in the “queue” or mempool of Bitcoin, waiting for miners to inсlude it in a block. The position in the mempool depends on the fee per byte you paid for your transaction — the higher the fee, the faster your transaction will be processed.
To predict how long it will take for your transaction to be confirmed, visit the explorer site blockchair.com and enter the transaction identifier (TXID, HASH). Let’s take an example for the transaction with hash b7f1813807462650e521b8d98a5da4fee9cfb80347cfefad96172e9f4ec64275.
Let’s gather all the necessary data for the calculation:
- In the screenshot below, we see that our transaction is in the Bitcoin mempool at position 1676 out of 9495 (priority 1676/9495), and the fee per byte is 16 satoshi.
- The average time for a block to be created in the Bitcoin network is 10 minutes.
- The average number of transactions that can be included in a Bitcoin block is 2500.
So, let’s do the calculation: the number 1676 (priority of our transaction in the Bitcoin mempool) is less than the number 2500 (the total number of transactions in a Bitcoin block), which means that our transaction will be included in the next block or in about 10 minutes (again, please note that all calculations are approximate).
In practice, the priority of a transaction constantly changes because new transactions are constantly being added to the network. And since no one can predict when a new block will be created, it is impossible to accurately calculate the confirmation time of a transaction.