Bitcoin Transaction Stuck: Fix It With RBF and CPFP

You sent bitcoin out of your wallet, the wallet shows the transaction, and for hours it has displayed the same word: unconfirmed. The short answer first: in the vast majority of cases nothing is lost, and you have two tools to sort the matter out yourself. They are called Replace-by-Fee and Child Pays For Parent, and which one you need depends on whether you are allowed to replace the transaction yourself or have to push it along from behind.

The reason this issue is hitting so many users right now lies in a technical change that entered the Bitcoin software in October 2025, and whose consequences have only become fully visible across the network this year. Since then, transactions paying fees below one satoshi per vByte can be relayed at all. Those transactions form today's backlog, the one many users are stuck in.

Bitcoin Transaction Stuck: What Is Really Happening in the Mempool

The Bitcoin price stood at roughly $76,700, or about 66,100 euros, on September 13, 2026 (CoinGecko, retrieved 09:52 UTC). The price is a side issue for this topic, but the market situation is not: when a lot of investors move their holdings off trading venues into self-custody after a pullback, the number of transfers on the network rises, and competition for space in the blocks gets tougher.