Timed payment receive windows and the increasing congestion on the Bitcoin blockchain

As mentioned briefly in my post on IOTA Tokens an incident made me take more interest in the lightweight distributed Tangle of IOTA. I wanted to make a quick post on what happened and get feedback if any others have experienced this and what you did, if anything to try to right the wrong.

I recently took up some Cloud Mining on the side for fun and a little extra profit. When going to update the hashing rate I had to send a small infusion of around $220 USD in bitcoin. Pretty straightforward so far, grabbed the amount pointed to the destination address and sent from Coinbase. I wanted to wait for the first confirmation from the blockchain and verification from the vendor that payment was successful in beginning transfer. The bitcoin address provided a 2 hour payment window from the payment processing service. Around 30 minutes in I wasn't too concerned as I've seen lower transactions take some time to get mined. At an hour and a half though I was starting to get a bit nervous. Let's just say the 2 hour mark came and went and after about 4 hours the transaction was FINALLY released from Coinbase into processing on the chain.

So....now what?

After the whole event, I checked my Hashflare account and sure enough the transaction showed Timed Out and my hash rate was still where it was previous. I had hopes that if given some time maybe payment had still been received and internally the service would sort out the details and up my hashing rate. This wasn't the case however so at this point I did the only thing I could think of, open a support case with all three parties involved. I included images of the payment Time Out message, the transaction info from blockexplorer and other relevant info such as a screenshot of the cryptopay site with the payment address and bitcoin amount as well.

The Coinbase Response

Coinbase was the first to get back to me on the issue, they were unable to help due to the nature of the blockchain and it's immutable nature. They did at least validate they had internal issues and that is why my transaction had remained on their network so long before being dropped into the pool to be mined. Not a helpful response but on the plus side at least they answered in a somewhat timely manner.

The cryptopay.me Response

The second in the list of 3 to respond was cryptopay.me and their support team. Cryptopay is the payment page you are redirected to after selecting bitcoin as the payment method on Hashflare. I had hoped they would be part of the equation to get this going but the response was disappointing. The short version is they are intermediaries between the two endpoints and cannot see the exchange in their system. I found this somewhat vexing, but nonetheless was pointed by cryptopay to get with Hashflare.

The missing link - Hashflare

So the final and most important party, Hashflare is yet to get back to me. I'm hopeful they are just under tremendous load dealing with other tickets and customers but as it has been 4 days now hope seems to be dwindling that I will see that added hashing rate.

So, has anyone else experienced a similar scenario? Were you able to get the situation fixed and if so what did you have to go through to do so? Also, what precautions do you take now that this has happened?

As always thanks for reading and please Follow and Upvote if you found this useful or interesting.

Until next time,
Doug