Bitcoin Low Fee Transaction Solutions - RBF & CPFP

Bitcoin Transaction Fees raise and fall in large spread this few days and I saw a lot of people suffering from long wait on their unconfirmed transactions. Here is what I told my friends to do with Electrum.

Scenario

Because everybody want a good deal in the fees, a lot of people that I know, including myself, will send transactions with seemingly too low fees. Usually, if you can wait, those low fee transactions will eventually be completed within several days. But somehow, you want to get these transaction accelerated.

There are 2 scenarios. Either you have control the sending account, or you control the receive accounts. In this tutorial, I am going to show you how you can deal with these scenarios with Electrum 3.0.1.

You have control on sending account

If you are the sending side, it is cheaper to achieve the goal. Yet, there is restriction.

The restriction is you must enable an option in the very beginning. You must turn on Propose Replace-By-Fee by doing the followings:

Tools > Electrum Preferences > Fees > Propose Replace-By-Fee > Always

This way, you will see the Replaceable box next to the manually fee box, as shown below:

When you sent the transaction with low fees, Electrum would show your transaction as Replaceable. Well, when you see this with the small warning sign, it is not a big deal, relax.

Here is what you can do.

Right Click the text Replaceable > Increase Fee

Electrum should get you a proper fee that would let the transaction be made. You may edit it if you want. The only caution is do NOT click the Final box - if you clicked it, you will not be able to increase the fee again.

The increased fees will be deducted from the transaction, so you do not need to have balance in your sending account.

You are receiving

In this case, you cannot increase the fee as shown above. You still have another way called CPFP, Child Pays For Parent. It works by letting you broadcast unconfirmed amount of transaction with additional fee, such that the newly applied fee will be enough for processing the previous transactions.

Electrum should be showing you the same Replaceable warning in the transaction that you receive. If you decide not to wait, you can:

Right Click the text Replaceable > Child pays for parent

Electrum will suggest a fee that will complete both the receiving and the CPFP transactions. Do NOT toy with these fees, just use what it suggests.

I am not using Electrum

Well, it depends on whether or not you really need to accelerate your transactions. If you really need to, you can import your wallet to Electrum by using BIP39 Seed or Private Keys - but make sure your computer is clean that no spyware can steal your Recovery Seed or Privaye Keys. The main thing you will need to know is to enable BIP39 Seed by using restore wallet option as shown below.

Transaction Accelerator

If you do not want to spend but still want to accelerate, you can try the free Transaction Accelerator by viaBTC.

https://pool.viabtc.com/tools/txaccelerator

Even you are not a customer of viaBTC mining pool will still be able to use the service for free. However there is quota every hour, and if quota exceed, it will show you not successful - you will have to manually try again in the next hour.

To sum up, make sure you do the followings:

• use Fee estimation websites wisely. For example, [1] or [2].
• Don't send large amount of Bitcoin with low fees if you are not sure - use default fees in this case.
• Use only wallet that let you to use Replace-By-Fee and CPFP.
• Don't expose your Recovery Seed on computers that could have compromised by spyware and malware.

I wish everyone luck!