One of the biggest hurdles in the global adoption of Bitcoin as a means of payments is its relatively slower transaction speed. In general, a bitcoin transaction can take anywhere from a few seconds to up to 60 minutes to complete. Yes, that’s long. Given that there are now available instant payment methods like Google Pay and Apple Pay, who would want to use such a sluggish payment option?

So, the common questions that everyone in the digital transaction space seems to be asking are — Why do bitcoin transactions take so long to complete? Is there any way to improve the transaction time?

Well, we have the answer.

Why Bitcoin Send & Receive Transactions take minutes to complete?

When multiple modern payment options like UPI and digital wallets, which are independent of blockchain, are allowing users to send/receive money with instant processing speed and nearly zero fees, bitcoin certainly lags behind in the race of the fastest international payment methods. A bitcoin send/receive transaction can take anywhere up to 60 minutes, which is huge compared to the industry standards. However, you cannot deny the fact that bitcoin is the most secure means for payments out there.

If you are wondering why bitcoin transactions take so much time, here are the possible reasons (factors that affect the bitcoin transaction speed).

There is a lot that goes into completing a bitcoin transaction securely. There are people called miners who are responsible for verifying each and every transaction that goes through the bitcoin network (blockchain). Now, the thing is each transaction has a reward associated with it, which miners get for verifying it. The reward is not fixed for every transaction, and the miners will usually choose to first verify transactions that offer the highest mining reward (transaction fee).

Another thing that affects the speed of blockchain transactions is the block processing speed, which is the time it takes to verify a block of bitcoin transactions, which is on average 10 minutes. It means you must expect your transaction to take at least 10 minutes to process, that is if you are paying a high enough transaction fee to be included in the first block itself.

Also, the size of the transaction will also contribute to how long it takes for the transaction to receive enough confirmation to be considered as final. Transactions involving a small amount of bitcoin can do with a single confirmation and will therefore execute faster compared to larger transactions that require more (six or more) confirmations.

How to increase Bitcoin transaction speed

There are some ways you can try to speed up the time it takes for your bitcoin transaction to complete. The most obvious one is to pay a higher transaction fee, which will ensure your transaction is added and verified with the first block (in less than 10 minutes).

To increase the bitcoin transaction speed beyond (less than) 10 minutes, the best you can do is find and use a highly powerful blockchain processor service.

Shiftal, for instance, is one of the best Bitcoin exchanges with instant speed for bitcoin transactions. All bitcoin transactions using Shiftal wallets are instant. Also, we use one of the best blockchain processors in the market that guarantees high transaction speed with zero errors and the lowest transaction fee. Try it out today at www.shiftal.com