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As everyone knows, we get a huge number of duplicate questions saying "My transaction is unconfirmed, what do I do?" I've sometimes noticed users responding with comments saying "accelerated". Example.

  • What are these commenters actually doing? To what extent does it help the asker get their transaction confirmed?

  • Is this is a desirable use of the site? If the "acceleration" actually does anything, it seems to me that it encourages people to clutter the site with duplicate questions, whereas what we really want is for them to find our canonical question, and not need to ask in the first place. In other words, I think the purpose of the site is to provide people with information, not with services.

  • If this is not desirable, what should we do to discourage it?

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There are some mining pools that set aside a contingent of their blocks to "accelerate" low-fee transactions. You can post your transaction id to the mining pool and if you're among the first ~100 per hour, they'll include your transaction in their next block even if it is not among the top 1MB of transactions per feerate. These "accelerator" sites usually go hand in hand with some heavy advertisement for one blocksize increase or another. Basically, mining pools are taking a small loss to advertise their political position and offer a way to treat the symptoms intermittent mempool congestions or of people using outdated wallet software.

The canonical question has been found 150k times. I think it's very visible, people that still ask about unconfirmed transactions don't know that their question is too localized, usually because they are completely new to the site. Essentially, they are misusing the site due to not knowing better. "Accelerating" transactions helps resolve these users' immediate problem, but encourages this undesirable behavior.

Since arguing against providing the acceleration service would probably leave a bad impression with our new users, I suggest that these comments should just be flagged "no longer needed", and the questions themselves closed as duplicates of the canonical question.

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