Recently there have been a few transactions which are taking a while to get confirmations. After the coins are sent to the network they aren't getting included in a block and they are stuck on 0 confirmations for up to 24 hours or in one case over 48 hours. These stuck transactions put CoinSpot in a tricky situation as a lot of our customers don't understand how transaction processing works and nor should they have to. Just as they don't understand how a bank sends money around they just need it to work.

This page on the Bitcoin wiki Transaction Fees is a great introduction to Transaction Fees for Bitcoin transactions and why and when they are needed. The wiki clearly states that transaction fees aren't needed if these three conditions are met

1. It is smaller than 1,000 bytes.
2. All outputs are 0.01 BTC or larger.
3. Its priority is large enough (see the Technical Info section below)

We do however see transactions getting stuck even when these three conditions are met. This transaction took over 3 days to get its first confirm d894e4cae34f637f279fc29f4357c2256540832264e1ec11e1a0489929cedc9f and in those 3 days I had one very upset customer, understandably so, that their coins weren't sent to the destination address. It leaves us in a very awkward position and one that is only really fixed by an increased consumer understanding of the network which is very unlikely to ever happen or by charging a fee on transactions to hopefully get them picked up faster.

So we are left to decide do we introduce a 0.001BTC or a 0.002BTC fee for every send? or do we just continue as usual with no fee? or perhaps we build up the functionality to allow you to decide if you want to include a fee or not?