I sent BTC/XCP/TOKEN a while ago, but the transaction hasn't gone through - why?

Look it up on a Bitcoin (blockchain.info) or Counterparty blockchain explorer (xchain.io; the former won’t let you see the details of non-BTC transaction), but you would be primarily interested in the following:

  • has the transaction actually happened (confirmations > 0)?
  • how many confirmations does the transaction have?

Transaction did happen

If the transaction did go through (3, 6 or more confirmations, depending on the recipient’s standard of what number is considered safe), then as far as Counterparty and Bitcoin are concerned, it’s done. For additional follow up check with the recipient of that transaction.

Transaction did not happen

If it hasn’t happened and it’s been several hours, it could be that the transaction fee wasn’t sufficient, or the network is simply too busy (as is right now).

If transaction has failed to go through within a day, you can try again. It is possible that the transaction was successfully broadcast (and is visible at blockchain.info, for example), but that it hasn’t obtained any confirmations.

At times of high congestion, such as in this chart, even higher fees aren’t guaranteed to help.

Another cause can be auto-adjustments on the blockchain. For example in this case no blocks have been mined for 47 minutes:

And naturally no transactions confirmations happened during that period of 40 plus minutes up to the highlighted block height 434788. So during that time if you participated in a transaction with a very large transaction fee, you would still experience a 40 minute delay.

Transaction happened, but I can’t see it on my exchange

And note that some cryptoexchanges may process withdrawals slightly slower (up to 12 hours). That may be due to their internal processes (moving funds internally, etc.) and is not a Counterparty or blockchain issue. Contact your exchange for help.

Additional information

  • Recommended Fees: you can obtain this information from Bitcoin Core and various Bitcoin wallets (they don’t need to be Counterparty-compatible - for tx fees we only care that the info is for the Bitcoin blockchain) and sites. One such site is Bitcoin Fee Estimation.

Example of required fees per KB as of March 3, 2016:

Make sure the information you reference is current - image above is not the current fee estimate.

  • Fee, fee per KB and transaction size information is usually displayed with transaction details (example: tx fee/kB 0.00038911; size: 570 bytes; fee paid: 0.0001)
  • Bitcoin Fees explained- http://bitcoinfees.com/ - if you want to learn how they’re calculated.

Note: We can’t vouch for accuracy and quality of content and information from 3rd party sites. These examples are for reference only.

2 Likes

how i can use your script and then can get setting fee sending

You can set your own fee by using any script or API source you want (example).

The fee is merely “suggested” in Counterparty defaults, but you can change it (which doesn’t guarantee the transaction will be processed, it only makes the defaults lower). See the topic below.

If you don’t use the Counterparty client or API but you compose “raw” bitcoin transactions, you can send (broadcast) them directly from any Bitcoin full node and in that case it’s up to that node’s settings to accept the fee or not before it relays the transaction to the network.