Unconfirmed transactions and open dialogue in the community of Bitcoin

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For more than a year in the Bitcoin community is increasingly heard complaints about unconfirmed transactions. Perhaps the most poignant users have experienced this problem on February 29 this year, when confirmation of some transactions had to wait for three days. And though after that massive delays were observed, confirming transactions still have to wait more than 10 minutes and sometimes it requires several hours. Naturally, this causes dissatisfaction among users. This article explains why the confirmation of the transaction takes much time and also describes possible solutions to the problem.
Unconfirmed transactions give rise to concern

It is logical that in light of the problems in the network appears more and more complaints about unconfirmed transactions. Almost every day new difficulties reported on the forums r/bitcoin bitcointalk.org, bitcoin.com and, of course, on r/btc. There is a perception that these publications are specially created by people looking to influence the course of discussions about the size of a block. However, in spite of everything, the problem exists, and it is very real for people who have hours to wait for a confirmation of the transaction and to pay increased fees to miners.
In this regard, some cryptocurrency wallets added to your software interface function replace-by-fee that determines the urgency of the transaction, depending on the size of the commissions. However, this option is presented, not in the wallets, and some users are directly dependent on what the Commission will select the platform for determining the priority of a transaction. If this Commission is very small, users have to wait for confirmation of their transactions for several hours and even days. If the transaction is not confirmed within three to seven days, it is removed from the memory pool of miners.
Memory pools are often crowded, especially during high volume trading, as often happens with the growth of Bitcoin and a corresponding increase in the number of transactions. In order to understand exactly where in the particular time the transaction is awaiting confirmation users have to use observers of the blockchain.
In most cases, if within three days of confirmation not received, wallets observers of the blockchain and remove the transaction from their records. This means that memory pool deletes the transaction and the funds are returned to the purse of the sender.
Read the reply that beginners should not worry that their money will be lost – they will either return back to the original wallet, or confirmed and sent to the recipient.
How to solve the scalability problem of Bitcoin? It exists several solutions, and still not clear what will help in this situation. They are tested, studied and discussed.
Inside the blockchain

The first of the proposed solutions – increasing the block size to 2 MB or more with a stiff updates. Currently the block size is 1 MB, it was installed due to clogging of the network with small transactions. A block size of 1MB limits the number of transactions per second, that is, at the present it's about 7 transactions. Some believe that increasing the size of the unit or removing the limit will increase the number of transactions and will make the cryptocurrency network is as fast as the networks of major payment cards.
Another proposed solution to the problem of scalability - Segregated Witness (Segwit). It consists in the fact that transactions are split with the isolation of signatures, then the data are processed separately. This update speeds up transactions and eliminates the elasticity. Separating the digital signature to another Merkle tree, Segwit provides the ability to include much more data in the transaction. Currently, talks about the release of this Protocol outside of the test network.
However, among supporters of Bitcoin, there are those who do not support the idea of big blocks, and believes that such an increase may lead to centralization in the realm of mining. There are also fears that the increase in can lower the fee, and miners will lose the incentive to protect the network. In addition, the network bandwidth will require the download of the full nodes. This change would entail adding a sufficiently large number of gigabytes to the already large blockchain of Bitcoin (now its size is approaching 90 GB).
On the other hand, many factors speak in favor of increasing the size of the block, and many believe that the increase may resolve the issue memory pool, slow transactions and high fees. Proposals to increase the size of the unit - a great many, as well as the number of attempts to promote this idea with clients BitcoinXT or Classic. To apply all these solutions to one common consensus.