Delayed withdrawals

Lately you may have noticed withdrawals being delayed by random more frequently. Not just on BitBargain but other marketplaces as well.

What is causing it?

To understand the problem better, here’s a couple of basics you need to know:

1) When you spend bitcoins from a source, *all* of it has to be spent. If you have 10 BTC and send someone 8 BTC, you’re really sending 8 BTC to them and 2 BTC back to yourself.

2) Transactions take time to confirm. When you send a transaction, it’s pending until it is included in a block in the blockchain. This happens on average every 10 minutes.

3) If the pending transactions take up more space than 1 MByte, not all of them make it into a block. Even if they don’t take up as much, the miner which finds the block could decide not to include any transactions in the block.

4) The ‘average 10 minutes per block’ is based on chance. It could be 3 blocks in 1 minute, or no blocks found for over an hour.

You can check the status of the bitcoin network, watch as blocks are found in realtime, see what size they are, how often a new one is found in realtime at:

https://blockchain.info/

Here is an example of the latest blocks: