All of us at some point in our lives have made money transactions, either banking or commercial. In Venezuela, as we all know, for some years now there has been a difficult situation which has led to the fact that finding cash has become a very chaotic situation as well as in other countries such as Sweden, South Korea and China where cash is no longer used as much as before due to the structural change in their payment models with the aim of eliminating the use of cash in the near future, therefore transactions have become mostly card transactions through a dataphone or online thus charging up to a 2% transaction fee adding to this the transaction duration time which depending on the banking network used can take a few seconds, hours or even days. However we know approximately when the other individual is going to receive the money, but.... That does not happen with BITCOIN.
When making use of Bitcoin to send or receive money transfers we are not sure exactly how long it will take, at the exact moment when you send a Bitcoin transfer it is sent directly to the cryptocurrency network to be verified, approved and then added to the known blockchain. But how long does this take?
The estimated processing time of the Bitcoin transaction will depend both on the network congestion, i.e. the saturation of a large number of transactions at the time within the block chain as well as the commission paid to perform such operation according to its priority, since miners give a higher priority to those transactions with a higher reward, leaving the rest for times when demand is reduced, so Bitcoin users sought to prioritize their transactions by increasing the commissions of their payments.
So, with medium to high commissions these transactions usually take from 10 minutes to 1 hour, the reason for this time range is that within different situations they merit different amounts of confirmations and each confirmation within the blockchain takes about 10 minutes approximately.
There are several types of transaction confirmations at the time of making a transaction, for example there are zero confirmation transactions, these are considered insecure because the merchant is vulnerable to double spending. For this reason not many people accept zero confirmation transactions even if they are very fast. On the other hand, merchants prefer transactions with higher security, transactions in which the number of confirmations is higher, each of these is equivalent to the Bitcoin transaction being included within a block belonging to the Bitcoin transaction pool, each of these takes about 10 minutes approximately. Therefore, if a transaction has about 6 confirmations its approximate waiting time will be about 60 minutes, however, it is fully guaranteed to be secure (no double spending).
To all this is added the law of supply and demand corresponding to the Bitcoin market, there is a constant demand for transactions, however by the way the block chain function can only enter a certain number of transactions to each block (between 3,500 to 4,000 per block) which leads to 7 transactions per second. This makes our transaction have a longer waiting time, but there is a way to change this and that is that the miners take our transaction and put it in the block chain but for this they must be offered a commission. The miners will prioritize the transactions with the highest commission.
However, there is something relevant in all of the above and that is unconfirmed transactions. If the commission offered for our transaction is too low no miner will take the transaction and it will be trapped in the Mempool, the number of transactions in the Mempool rises or falls depending on the unconfirmed transactions with respect to supply and demand. If the demand goes down the prices fall and Mempool confirmations start to be included inside the blocks, by this time the minimum commission can be a couple of dollars, however for this to happen and your confirmation can be included in the blockchain it can take a long time. Moreover, if the demand increases the number of transactions in Mempool will increase and your commission can be up to 40 to 50 dollars minimum.
As a conclusion and recommendation for all those cryptocurrency users, it is always good to be careful enough about our Bitcoin transactions, because depending on whether the demand goes down or up and the amount of commission, this will affect whether our transaction will be confirmed or sent to the well-known Mempool. For this, there are websites that can be of great help for you (ycharts, bitinfocharts) where you can see the average commission of the transactions included in the Bitcoin blockchain. So you don't need to waste money on commissions to make sure that your transaction will be processed quickly.
Roberto Garcia
Instagram: @bitcoin_cash_house
www.casabitcoin.cash
