Sending, receiving, fees and the mempool

To receive bitcoin you share an address from your wallet. Addresses are safe to share, and a good wallet gives you a fresh one each time for privacy.

To send, you paste the other person's address, choose an amount and pick a fee. Always check the first and last few characters of the address before you confirm, because some malware swaps addresses on your clipboard. For a new recipient, send a small test first.

The mempool

Once sent, your transaction waits in the mempool, which is a waiting room of payments that are not in a block yet. Fees are priced in sats per virtual byte (sat/vB), and miners pick the transactions paying the highest rate first. When lots of people are sending at once, fees rise. When it is quiet, they fall.

You can see the queue live on mempool.space. It shows suggested fees for fast, medium and slow confirmation. When fees are low (1 sat/vB on 31 October 2026), it is a cheap time to move coins to cold storage.

Confirmations

When your payment is included in a block it has one confirmation. Each block after that adds another. For small amounts one is usually enough. For large amounts people often wait for several.

For a visual explanation of how the ledger works, watch the video below, or go straight to the source in the whitepaper.

All lessons

Not financial advice. These lessons are general education only. Bitcoin prices can swing hard. Never put in more than you can afford to lose, and do your own research.