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I just read Why do small transactions without fees ever get processed? and it made me wonder about the risk that a legitimate, lock_timed transaction might not be processed once the lock_time is past.

I'm aware (from the above question) that in the reference implementation, the increasing age of a transaction (in the mempool once it's been submitted?) should increase its priority regardless of the its fees but not every miner is willing to process low(/no) fee transactions even now never mind what they may (not) do in future.

So if I have a signed transaction with a (very!) distant lock_time and it has fees that were considered reasonable at the time that the transaction was created and then when I submit it after lock_time what is the risk that no miners will process it because its fees are subsequently considered to be too low to bother with it?

Community
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Phil Dann Ward
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If that does happen, all you need to do is spend your unconfirmed transaction's output with a sufficient fee. A "sufficiently greedy miner" will process both transactions just to get the fee of the latter.

njaard
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  • Oh I see. I hadn't considered that miners would analyse the queue in such way looking for various threads of dependent transactions and pick the most profitable *threads* over simply picking the most profitable transactions...although it *does* make sense so long as the extra profits on threads more than makes up for the CPU time that they expend analysing the queue to find them. – Phil Dann Ward Mar 21 '14 at 18:35