RE: Just Doubled up My CUB

Well, I've learned my lesson. Always up the gas fees to the "fast" recommendation, because if a transaction gets 'stuck' there's no way to move forward with a new transaction until that one either succeeds, fails, or is cancelled, and you have to pay gas to cancel it (and if the gas you pay to cancel is too low, the cancel can literally take days).

So, just bite the bullet and pay the premium to make sure your transactions don't get stuck in Ethereum hell. (Also, if you're using UniSwap, if the transaction takes longer than the timeout interval, which is 20 minutes by default, then you still end up paying the ETH gas fees, but the transaction gets rejected by UniSwap -- so it's gas paid literally for nothing).

Thanks for asking.

I finally got everything 'unstuck'. I had to send USD fiat to CashApp, buy BTC on CashApp, send the BTC to Bittrex, convert BTC to ETH, send ETH to metamask, then use the ETH on metamask to free up the transactions on UniSwap (or something like that -- it was a convoluted mess!).

Totally crazy that I had to jump through so many hoops when I had ERC-20 tokens in my wallet with plenty of value, but no actual ETH to pay the gas fees.

The other thing I learned through this process was that you cannot easily 'cancel' a slow transaction on the Ethereum network and you cannot initiate a new transaction without the first transaction either succeeding or failing.

So there are actually two ways to end up in Ethereum hell:

• Not having enough ETH to pay the gas fees.
• Not providing a transaction with enough ETH to keep it in the 'fast lane'.

Without realizing the existence of the sequential-queuing limitation, I ended up with 5 or so time-sensitive transactions in the queue, all stuck behind my initial low-gas transaction, with those transactions destined to 'fail' for exceeding UniSwap's time limit.

I had used the 'cancel' option to try to clear out earlier 'pending' transactions, but then eventually (a day later) discovered that those cancels were also going to take days to process as 'canceled', and that I could not conduct additional transactions until they cleared the queue. So, I had to add a bunch more gas to those 'cancel' orders to get them finally canceled and 'out of the way' so I could place new transactions.

What a ROYAL PAIN! I have been so spoiled by Hive's 3-second block validation and fee-less transactions. This is one more reason why I am so bullish on Hive and LeoFinance.

The takeaway (for me):

• Stay away from the Ethereum network, if at all possible.
• If you MUST operate there, always put in enough gas (ETH) to stay in the fast lane for each and every transaction. Getting out of being stuck in the slow lane will end up costing you more (in both time and ETH) than just starting out in the fast lane.