I bought bitcoin 1 hour ago from a legit website. Why is it not in my wallet?
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Answers below are by Wellington W. Sculley, Doug Sandlin and Evar Dion.
Answered Dec 8th, 2017
One possible explanation is that you’re experiencing the actual speed of Bitcoin. You will hear from a lot of people that Bitcoin is “real-time” or “instant.” This is true when you’re moving between accounts in the same wallet-provider or exchange. In these cases, you’re “moving” balances between accounts in a closed network, but not actually using Bitcoin. The reality is that the Bitcoin blockchain (a network) generally requires about 60mins to complete an actual transfer from one account to another. It can take even longer (days!) if you don’t pay a high enough transaction-fee to the miners. In your case, my guess is that you paid a transaction fee that will get you your BTC, but will take longer than the usual ~60mins.
Answered Dec 7th, 2017
Bitcoin network transactions times alone can take longer than that – significantly longer when network traffic is really high. And, specifically with today’s price spikes – network traffic is currently really high. Combine that with the fact that every website/ service/exchange that sells bitcoin has various layers of additional processing time factored in, as well.
Answered Dec 9th, 2017
It depends entirely on the transaction fee that you paid. Because of high network demand the average fee is currently $27 USD. If you paid the average fee or less, then right now it could take upto 8-12 hours to process because there is currently a huge backlog of 171825 Unconfirmed Transactions If you paid more than the average fee then you will be processed much quicker.. as quick as 1 second to 10 minutes for the first confirmation (depending on how much fee you paid). If you paid no fee at all then you just have to hope that some computer bothers to process your transaction. Also if you are running a full node wallet on your own PC then you need to wait for the local copy of the block-chain to sync before your balance shows up. (something that is not required if you are using a web wallet)
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