Bitcoin has been on the move, and so has the number of transactions on the Bitcoin network. Currently, the network is being overwhelmed with transactions, with 281k unconfirmed transactions. These are cases where people have sent Bitcoin, but the network hasn't confirmed the transaction, and the recipients haven't received the Bitcoin. As a result, there are many anxious individuals, myself included, waiting for payments to go through.
My Bitcoin ATMs allow people to send Bitcoin to me. Once the Bitcoin is confirmed on the network, they can then go and withdraw cash from the ATM. Until last week, the ATMs had never had a problem buying Bitcoin from people. However, I noticed that people were selling Bitcoin, withdrawing cash, but I wasn't receiving Bitcoin. When I checked my Bitcoin wallet, I could see that the customer had sent the Bitcoin, and it was pending. I was perplexed at how customers were able to withdraw the cash without the minimum required confirmations on the Bitcoin network that I set on my software.


After a deep dive, I discovered that I had set my wallet to have a forwarding address, generating a new Bitcoin address every time someone sent me Bitcoin to keep my address private. What I didn't know was that I had not set minimum fees for processing my Bitcoin transactions when they were broadcast, and the forwarding service voided the required minimum confirmation on the network for me to actually have the Bitcoin in my wallet before withdrawing the cash.
I was in a race against time to get these transactions confirmed somehow since my ATMs had already dispersed thousands in cash. After two weeks, if Bitcoin transactions aren't confirmed, the Bitcoin is returned to the sender. I had thousands of dollars in Bitcoin transactions broadcast to the network with almost no fees attached to them, and they didn't stand a chance of being confirmed. After extensive research, I found a way to get unconfirmed transactions confirmed in less than an hour and do it for free. Here's how I did it:
Go to ViaBTC - Transaction Accelerator
Once you are on the ViaBTC site, you will need to create an account and enter your transaction ID into the box. You are allowed several free submissions. ViaBTC ensures that your transaction gets added to the next block of transactions being mined by Bitcoin miners. My original transaction had almost no fees attached to it, and this accelerator worked perfectly; the transactions were confirmed an hour later. So, if you have a Bitcoin transaction stuck in the mempool or just want to speed up a transaction, this is the perfect tool.