Lots of activity on the blockchain. Mining fees are up, use your own wallet.

People are asking why their bitcoin isn't available.

With the recent price action, many people are moving their bitcoins to trade them.

Many BitCoin services out there are web wallets. They usually have no ability to adjust mining fees.

Up to a few days ago the fees had been low for months.

Any time you use a username or email and password, it's a web wallet. With the exception of airbits.

If you have a wallet.dat file, or a 12-25 word seed phrase, you have they keys- a ~30 character address that starts with 5, or 6 if encrypted. I suggest electrum wallet.

Use a segwit wallet, it will help reduce congestion, and lower fees. Segwit adoption is around 45%. It was around 10% last year.

Addresses starting with 1 are legacy, try to stop using those. Starting with a 3 is either multisig legacy, or p2sh segwit, it's a go between compatibility address. Be careful with these, other coins use the same address format, if you make a mistake with your own wallets, you'll have to export/import your keys to recover the coins if you sent the wrong type. Bech32 is the current address format, they start with bc1 some older wallets don't recognize the format.

Electrum is available on Mac/win/Linux/Android. It is not available on iOS. For iOS coinomi has had a segwit wallet for a while now, and BRD just upgraded. But they don't have much for advanced features.

Any BitCoin transaction you do, should involved your own wallet that you have the keys to.

The best way to go, is to keep some BitCoin in a wallet, and spend that when you need to. And replace it as you spend it. But don't spend it all. Somewhat difficult to do in the current bear market.

When you involve your own wallet, you'll know you've got the coins. Without it, you might not know if it's an issue with the sending, or receiving wallet. From there you can send them. If you use electrum, you can send coins that have only been brodcast, and have not confirmed. You can set the fee higher to get them to confirm sooner. Don't spend it all. You'll want some left over so that you can raise the fee more if there's a sudden spike in fees. You can send the remaining balance with a higher fee called Child Pays For Parent, or CPfP. Or if you used Raise By Fee you can do an RBF adjustment.

There are other reasons to use your own wallet. Web wallets tend to delay the transaction. Sometimes web wallets wait for 2fa/email confirmation. Many of them group transactions waiting a couple minutes or for the next block to group them together, it does help reduce mining fees.

When you send from one web wallet to some other web wallet if there is an issue, like an expired invoice they can't simply return it to where it came from, most web wallets will not know to credit your account.

You can also sign the key proving you are the owner of the coins that were sent. To get a web wallet to do this you would have to contact support. Most exchanges will not give you the key, and they probably won't do any signing for you. Some exchanges charge $500+ per hour for this kind of support.

When BitCoin is sent it is brodcast, this happens almost instantly. From there it sits in mempool, the highest bidder that can fit in the next block will get confirmed, the rest have to wait for the next block. The target for a block is 10 min, but it could take much more, or much less time. Closer to 10 min is more likely to happen than further away.

Currently to get a quick confirmation it's 62 Satoshi per byte. A typical transaction is 220 buytes. 62x220=13640 Satoshi for your text fee. Current exchange rate around $4500 x 0.00013640 BTC is about $0.61 for the mining fee.

Some wallets are setup poorly, and people are paying 100sat/byte.

If you can wait a little bit, 54sat/byte should confirm in about an hr.

To get up to date fee estimates you can check
https://statoshi.info/dashboard/db/fee-estimates
Look just below the first chart it will have current estimates for how many Satoshi/byte you need to pay to get a confirmation in the next block or lower fees for the next few blocks. Electrum also has a built in fee estimate.

Some wallets will notifiy you of an incoming transaction. There used to be an app you could setup to alert you to certain blocks or certain transactions getting a confirmation, bit it got pulled from the play store. Would like to know if anyone knows of an alternative.