BitHedge

Your Bitcoin transaction is stuck. Here is what to do

A pending transaction is not lost, and it is not gone. It is sitting in the mempool offering miners a fee they currently have better options than. The fix is to improve the offer.

What is actually happening

When you send bitcoin, your wallet broadcasts a signed transaction to the network, where it waits in the mempool — the pool of transactions not yet in a block. Miners assemble each block from the highest fee-rate transactions available, measured in satoshis per virtual byte, not in total fee.

If the network gets busier after you send, your fee rate falls down the queue. There is no timeout and no queue position to lose: a transaction can sit for hours or days and then confirm normally the moment fees fall. Nodes eventually drop very old unconfirmed transactions from their mempools, after which the coins are simply unspent again.

You cannot cancel it. You can outbid it

Bitcoin has no cancel button, because there is no central party to instruct. What you can do is broadcast a replacement: the same payment, spending the same inputs, with a higher fee. Miners take the more profitable one and the original becomes unspendable — the coins can only be spent once, so only one version can ever confirm.

This is replace-by-fee (RBF), and it is a standard part of the protocol rather than a trick. In BitHedge, open the transaction from the activity list and choose Stuck? → Pay a higher fee. Your coins never leave your control at any point, and there is no risk of the payment going through twice.

If the wallet did not signal RBF

A transaction has to be marked replaceable when it is created. Most modern wallets do this by default; some older ones did not. If yours cannot be replaced, the remaining option is child-pays-for-parent: spend one of the outputs of the stuck transaction in a new, high-fee transaction. Miners must include the parent to collect on the child, so the pair confirms together. This only works if you control one of the outputs — typically the change coming back to you.

When you are waiting to be paid

If someone owes you and their transaction is stuck, you can see it in a mempool explorer by its transaction ID, along with its fee rate and a rough position. You cannot speed it up unless CPFP applies to an output you control. Usually the right move is to tell the sender to bump it, and to wait — an unconfirmed transaction with a sensible fee almost always confirms eventually.

Avoiding it next time

Common questions

Why is my Bitcoin transaction unconfirmed?

Its fee rate is below what miners are currently including in blocks, so it is waiting in the mempool. It is not lost, and it has not failed — it is an offer the market has not yet taken.

Can I cancel an unconfirmed Bitcoin transaction?

Not cancel, but you can replace it. Broadcasting a higher-fee transaction that spends the same inputs — replace-by-fee — supersedes the original, since only one transaction spending a given coin can ever confirm.

How long can a Bitcoin transaction stay unconfirmed?

Indefinitely in principle. In practice nodes drop unconfirmed transactions from their mempools after about two weeks, at which point the coins become spendable again and you can resend at a sensible fee.

What is replace-by-fee?

A protocol feature that lets a transaction be replaced before confirmation by another spending the same inputs with a higher fee. It is how a stuck payment is rescued without the coins ever leaving your control or the payment being made twice.

Does BitHedge support RBF?

Yes. Open the transaction from the activity list and choose Stuck? → Pay a higher fee. The app rebuilds the payment at a higher fee rate and rebroadcasts it.

BitHedge is a Bitcoin-only self-custody wallet for iPhone. Keys are generated on your device and never transmitted — no account, no KYC, no tracking. See how it works.

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