Payment and confirmation
Why Bitcoin payments take the time they take, what the house does while waiting, and when a fee bump is worth it.
The honest timeline
- You approve the payment. It enters the mempool, the waiting room of unconfirmed transactions. The ticket reads PAYMENT SEEN.
- A miner includes it in a block. On average blocks arrive every ten minutes, but individual gaps of an hour happen and mean nothing is wrong. Inclusion depends on your fee rate relative to everyone else's.
- One confirmation. The house verifies it independently and the ticket reads BILL SETTLED. The kitchen takes over from here; the inscribing and delivery steps are the house's own transactions, tracked on the same ticket.
What the fee rate you chose controls
Only step 2. A higher fee rate buys a better place in line for your payment; it does not speed up blocks themselves. The quote showed you the fee-rate options with live numbers when you paid.
When a bump makes sense
If the fee market rose after you paid, your payment can sit in the mempool below the going rate. The app detects this and can offer a replacement at a higher rate:
- The offer shows the new network cost and, on a paid order, the exact 1,500-sat service increment before you approve. An order made entirely of free-mint credits carries no service fee, so a bump on it adds only the network cost.
- Only an accepted, broadcast replacement costs anything; rejections and failures add nothing.
- Either the original or the replacement confirms, never both, and the mint output is preserved in both.
If you decline a bump, your payment remains valid and will confirm whenever the fee market lets it, or the order will eventually expire and any late-confirming payment is refunded to its source.
After your payment
Payment confirmation is separate from inscription confirmation and delivery. A batch shares one payment, while each Feline keeps its own fulfillment state. Payment confirmed at last check and Unconfirmed at last check show the recorded result with its actual observation time. Historical evidence is not a fresh chain check; confirmation is unavailable when trustworthy evidence is missing.
Inscribing and delivery are the house's responsibility. ON HOLD FOR REVIEW pauses an item pending verified recovery; eligible causes can resume automatically. If the original payment was consumed by earlier processing, recovery requires an operator wallet through the guarded staff funding process. Do not pay again. The original order remains the reference; use Contact support on its ticket for an update. Recovery is not another purchase.