How can one predict how long a transaction will take to be confirmed?
I am asking because I have just done one transaction to pay for a gift card and it did not confirm by the time that was allotted before expiring. Now I have no way to cancel the transaction and given it is a shielded transaction I can already see the headache to get a refund.
This is particularly odd to me as I see blocks being confirmed with very few transactions included, so they are definitely not full. I understand we don’t have a fee market so I shouldn’t have to worry about that, right? I am sending from Nighthawk wallet if that can help clarify my situation.
How do we deal with this? Cause that’s a bit of a problem isn’t it.
EDITs:
The transaction luckily expired as well so I don’t have to ask for a refund. The question is still relevant as it could have ended up confirmed on the blockchain.
I see that different transactions have different fees. Most, I believe, are 0.0001 but some are higher or lower. Is there actually a fee market? If so, any way to configure the fee on Nighthawk and do we have any way to estimate the appropriate cost?
Transactions that pay the proper fee are usually mined almost instantly. The latest nightHawk should support 317 fee calculation, not sure. Ywallet definitely does.
317 enforcement dictates a set fee rate per inputs/outputs/actions of a transaction. If the allocated fee amount is below that threshold, it consumes at least one of the unpaid actions of every block. The limit is currently set to 50. Technically, though, you could set the fee to whatever you wanted.
Much of the Spam transactions consume 47-49 actions which don’t leave hardly room for anything else and so getting your transaction mined can be difficult if the number of actions unpaid are excessive.
Inputs an outputs are the notes that go into the transaction and the number of recipients on the other side. Actions are a generic term used for orchard and describes either.
Transactions that pay the proper fee can be included in any block including Spam blocks because they consume no unpaid actions.
Interesting. Indeed, I don’t remember Ywallet ever dropping a single transaction as far as I am concerned. I have had multiple transactions dropped on Nighthawk however (including since upgrade to latest wallet SDK).
Thanks for the clarifications, I understand the situation a bit better now.