Unable to send tokens

Question

Since December 3rd I have attempted to send ~200 OMG from my wallet to a OMG wallet on a exchange. I am attempting to do this through myetherwallet.com and I have tried about 4 times now. Every time it goes into a pending state and it never goes through. I usually just end up cancelling the pending transaction by sending 0 eth to myself with the same nonce as the pending transaction. This is my first real attempt to send tokens from my wallet to somewhere else, so it is very likely I am doing something wrong. Each time I have attempted, I usually wait at least 12 hours, and the longest I have waited is about 28 hours.

My wallet address is viewable on etherscan here. What is odd is that the pending transaction may or may not be listed, depending on my luck. Sometimes it shows up, sometimes it doesn't. My latest attempt's transaction hash is 0x45a36912bfdb5fd1c5d4965e844a3f728b7c1f5a71c50ae2d0408dee7981ee67 and it is still pending.

The first 3 attempts I used the default gas limit which is something around ~51,000? On this last attempt that is still pending (been pending for more than a day now), I increased the gas limit to 200,000.

Am I just using too small of a value? I figured the added traffic from cryptokittie might be causing an issue and I am not setting a high enough transaction fee. Is there something else I am missing or overlooking?

Thanks!

Answer 1

There is a difference between gas limit and gas price. For example, in a car, you might say "I'm willing to buy up to 100 litres of gas and pay $1 for each litre." If you only need 1 litre to go to your destination, you only owe a dollar. The gas limit is number of litres of gas you're willing to buy. The gas price is how much you're willing to pay for it.

The more you're willing to pay per litre of gas, generally, the more likely it is that your transaction will get included in the next block. So, instead of raising your gas limit, you should be raising your gas price. However, you do need to make sure you have a high enough gas limit: if it's too low, you'll run out of gas before getting to where you go (computation-wise). If it's too high, you might end up paying for gas and be no closer to your destination because your map was wrong (an infinite loop/error in the code).

And yes, it's probably crypto kitties. https://ethgasstation.info will give you an idea as to what you should set your gas price to in order to have your transaction confirmed in a certain amount of time.