Using RBF to bump a Bitcoin transaction's fee

Some Bitcoin transactions may end up getting stuck unconfirmed in the mempool due to an influx of transactions on the network, being surpassed by those using higher fees.

This means that some customers' transactions may only confirm many hours or even days later, if they were sent with a now-comparatively low fee.

In this situation, you can use replace-by-fee (RBF), a Bitcoin feature which allows you to rebroadcast an unconfirmed transaction with a higher fee to better match the current fee environment and confirm faster.

Replacing a transaction

To bump a transaction's fees, you'll need the unconfirmed transaction's 'Transaction ID' (also known as its txid or hash), which can be found in your admin's Transactions panel.

In your server's terminal, run the following command, replacing txid:

bitcoin-cli -conf=/mnt/blockchains/bitcoin/bitcoin.conf bumpfee txid

Example:

bitcoin-cli -conf=/mnt/blockchains/bitcoin/bitcoin.conf bumpfee 5c9d418e36b1a5da22e457fbbe08b56362ed9b37d4c841d58dd3bac4bd828d49

⚠️‏‏‎ ‎ NOTE: Fee-bumping applies only to transactions made after switching to RBF by default.

Enabling RBF transactions

If you encounter a message that the transaction wasn't sent flagged with RBF, then it is ineligible for fee-bumping.

However, you can ensure future transactions are sent with RBF by using our script to upgrade bitcoind and switch to RBF transactions.

To do so, follow the Bitcoin section of our article on updating your node wallets.