On Monday, December 4, i accidentally sent a $260 BTC transaction (approx .022 BTC) from my blockchain wallet with an extremely low fee. The fee I used was approximately $0.26. The fee was estimated automatically by the blockchain wallet and I proceeded to send without double checking the fee, obviously the fee estimator was not having a good day, but I can't excuse myself for not placing a more appropriate fee.
After about 12 hours I realized that my transaction had not been confirmed, the most i have ever waited was 8 hours, and I was a little bit concerned. Of course there has been a huge rise in transactions over the past couple of weeks, and after checking the unconfirmed transactions page on blockchain (https://blockchain.info/unconfirmed-transactions) The page showed well over 200k unconfirmed at the time, and I was a little less concerned. I decided to wait a day before checking again, figuring that the transaction would surely be completed by then.
The next day, I checked again, still no confirmations and I was starting to get uneasy about the situation. I was convinced that my BTC would be lost forever. I started googling unconfirmed transactions, and was looking for a way to fix the problem ASAP. Could I reverse the transaction? NO. Could I add a fee to the transaction to increase its probability of getting accepted into a block? NO* Would the transaction eventually get forgotten by the network and sent back to my original wallet? MAYBE, I did a lot of research on rejected or stale transactions, and found mixed answers. I did read that it would be possible for a single miner to mine the transaction, but I don't have any miners in my personal network, that option was out. The only thing that I was able to do was "rebroadcast" which i attempted to do, nothing happened, and based on the info I received about rebroadcasting, it's rarely a successful strategy for a stuck transaction. There wasn't much else that I could think of, After 3 days i was starting to accept my transaction's possible fate of never going anywhere. And it was quite frustrating.
For a few more days, I watched my wallet and the transaction in the Blockchain with no movement, and really lost hope, I told myself, "at least this will be a good learning experience" and "I'll never do that again"
Yesterday i was having a conversation with a fellow crypto enthusiast near where I live and I told him about my issue. He immediately said, "you can fix that" and I was all ears. He gave me the name of the website, http://confirmtx.com/, and said that using the site would help to push my transaction through for no fee. I was skeptical, but willing to try pretty much anything. I went to the site and inputted my transaction #, after hitting the "Accelerate Now" button, i got a confirmation that the transaction had been queued, a good start.
I went about my business for the rest of the day without paying attention to my wallet, I wasn't expecting anything to happen, like it hadn't in over a week at that point. I got around to checking the transaction this morning, 61 confirmations! It had finally gone through! I cannot guarantee that http://confirmtx.com/ was the one who helped push the transaction through, but I am certainly giving them the credit for this one. It wasn't until I connected to that site that I was able to get it through.
The best part about http://confirmtx.com/ is there are no fees for transactions under 400 bytes, so If you are stuck like I was, give http://confirmtx.com/ a try. Hopefully you will have some luck. I know that I was able to get my transaction with a puny $0.26 fee through.
This was a good learning experience for me, and I now know where I'll go if I have another slow transaction. The experience wasn't all bad either, in the 10 days waiting for confirmation my $260 worth of BTC had grown to about $380 worth, and I got to keep it all! It was an interesting ride!
*Not from my blockchain.info wallet anyways. Apparently there are some wallets that will allow you to do some things to adjust transaction in progress, or help to push it through. I'm not very tech savvy, and my wallet wouldn't support these actions anyways, so that option was out for me.
This is not a paid advertisement for http://confirmtx.com/, I am not receiving compensation from http://confirmtx.com/ for this information. I just think that they are a great website that can help a lot of people with their BTC transaction troubles!