Everyone has no experience when they start . <| sep |> The SNP thankfully are likely to look at 6 months as being too short rather than the Westminster mode of thought which put 4 as plenty . <| sep |> Since there is limited space in each block , the transactions that get confirmed by miners are the ones with the highest fees , and the other transactions never get confirmed and eventually get dropped . Essentially that means there is a fee market and there is competition to get each transaction recorded , so there is a kind of auction to ensure your transaction will get confirmed . Since there are more transactions happening on the network lately and blocks are full , you have to ensure you are paying enough in fees to have your transaction confirmed . You can find a fee estimator here , if you want to get confirmed right away , you need a fee of around 91100 satoshi ' s per byte or more . If a hypothetical transaction had a fee of 0 . 0001 BTC , and the transaction size was 817 bytes . That means it was only bidding about 12 satoshi ' s per byte , not nearly enough . Its fee should have been about 8 times higher . With good wallets e . g . BitcoinQt your tx would be confirmed within 10 minutes unless you manually set your fees . What wallet are you using ?