Exchange transfers to wallet....

[Mike Cautillo]

Good morning from the TDOT......just wondering why does the transfer of BTC from exchange to wallet slower that from wallet to wallet?? Also, can you use the BTC in your wallet even though the transaction is not confirmed. ( I believe this is an ongoing debate among the community for small $$ amounts)

Thanks:)

[BitcoinXio]

Good morning from the TDOT......just wondering why does the transfer of BTC from exchange to wallet slower that from wallet to wallet?? Also, can you use the BTC in your wallet even though the transaction is not confirmed. ( I believe this is an ongoing debate among the community for small $$ amounts)

Thanks:)

It depends on the exchange but more than likely the exchange is holding funds until there is enough to do a bulk transaction; that way they pay less in fees. Also there could be other things involved such as QA checks on the account, etc (automated hopefully) prior to sending. Exchanges don't operate the same as wallets.

Unconfirmed tx's can't be spent, whether it's a wallet or exchange. It's just the way Bitcoin works.

[Mike Cautillo]

Thanks.....Coinbase is the exchange and the confirmation took over 1hr, although it was small $4.50. If this time can improve to let's say even 15 min., maybe one way we can get consumers to mitigate volatility and uncertainty, is to keep cash ( small amounts and for a specific use case) on an exchange where cash is easily converted to BTC when required so they're almost guaranteed the funds to have the same purchasing power and readily available at the time of purchase.

Maybe even have a wallet service that could create this program where every time a BTC is either sent or sits in their wallet-it actually gets converted to cash on the back end until required to be spent in BTC. Maybe something like this already exists...not sure but could be something to make people more comfortable using BTC....virtually very little risk until the price stabilizes and we have global adoption

[bitkilo]

Transactions from exchanges do take a little longer mainly due to the fact that they first have to verify that the transactions is valid before sending and then combine that with other outgoing transactions outputs to save on tx fees. (If a exchange used a new tx output for every withdrawal then they would pay a heap in fee at the end of each day) that cost would then be passed on to the user so it's best to wait.

If it was a very large withdrawal then the exchange would have to get further approval, hopefully not just via email as we seen what happens with that setup.
Once approval is given cold storage would be accessed and the BTC sent from there in one tx.

Exchanges are always on alert for scams so it's just normal they take such precautions.

I'm not 100% but maybe lightning side chains could help exchange tx times.

[BitcoinXio]

Just food for thought, it may not have been Coinbase (the exchange) in this situation. The delayed transaction may have just been from the sheer number of bitcoin transactions that needed to be validated and there could have been a backlog. Not sure if you have heard of the "blocksize debate" anywhere yet, but it's been a hot topic as of late, where people have been discussing how to scale bitcoin to allow for more transactions as transaction times overall have been slowing down a bit due to a higher volume of transactions. When these "backlogs" happens sometimes transaction times slow down, regardless if it's an exchange or wallet.