> For the complete documentation index, see [llms.txt](https://docs.gobtcpay.com/llms.txt). Markdown versions of documentation pages are available by appending `.md` to page URLs; this page is available as [Markdown](https://docs.gobtcpay.com/guides/payment-lifecycle.md).

# Payment Lifecycle

This guide follows a GoBTC Pay payment from the moment a customer pays at your till to the moment it is final on the Bitcoin network.

### The one thing to understand

{% hint style="success" %}
**A GoBTC Pay payment is accepted instantly, but settles on Bitcoin a little later.**
{% endhint %}

The instant you see **Approved**, the money is yours, and you can hand over the goods. Behind the scenes, the actual Bitcoin transaction is bundled with others and recorded on-chain over the next few hours. That second step doesn't change whether you got paid; it just makes the payment final and irreversible.

Think of it like a card payment: the terminal says "approved" right away, and the funds settle into your account afterward.

### What the customer experiences

1. The customer reviews the amount and confirms it in their wallet.
2. GoMining checks the confirmation and returns **Approved** in about a second.
3. You hand over the goods. Done: from your side, the sale is complete.

The customer pays **no fee** and never touches a Bitcoin network fee.

### The three states of a payment

| State         | What it means                                                                             | What you should do                          |
| ------------- | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ------------------------------------------- |
| **Pending**   | Accepted at the till. Funds are yours; the on-chain transaction hasn't been recorded yet. | Hand over the goods. Nothing else needed.   |
| **Confirmed** | The transaction has been recorded in a Bitcoin block.                                     | Nothing; settlement is underway.            |
| **Final**     | Settled on Bitcoin. No chargebacks, no disputes, no reserves, ever.                       | Nothing. The payment can never be reversed. |

{% hint style="info" %}
Your dashboard shows **Pending** as soon as a payment is accepted. The word **Approved** you may see in API responses means the same thing: accepted at the till.
{% endhint %}

### How long settlement take

GoMining produces about **two blocks per day**, so a payment usually becomes **Confirmed** within a few hours. This wait is expected; it does not affect the fact that you were already paid the moment you saw **Pending**.

If GoMining's mining is briefly unavailable, the pending transactions can be sent to the public Bitcoin network instead, where any miner can record them. Settlement is never stuck indefinitely.

### What does it cost you?

* **Customers:** no fee.
* **Merchants:** a **0.2% acquiring fee** (split as 0.1% to miners and 0.1% to wallet providers).

### Where your money lands

How a payment settles on-chain depends on your chosen settlement mode:

* **Operator-settled (default):** GoMining receives the on-chain payment and reconciles your payout afterward. Simplest to run.
* **Direct-to-merchant (optional):** the payment goes straight to a Bitcoin address you co-control, for full Layer 1 finality.

See [Settlement Modes](/guides/settlement-modes.md) for the full comparison and fees.

***

### Under the hood (technical details)

The rest of this page explains the mechanics for readers integrating the protocol. You don't need any of it to accept payments.

#### Cumulative pre-authorization

Instead of signing a fixed spending limit, the customer signs a **growing running total** with each payment. Every new payment is signed for the previous total plus the new amount:

```
new total = previous total + this payment
```

Each signed total must be strictly larger than the last. This gives GoMining an upper bound it cannot exceed, and makes rollback and double-spend impossible inside the instant-payment subsystem: the wallet refuses to sign a total that is smaller than, or inconsistent with, the previous one.

#### Custody during the lifecycle

* Funds sit at a **2-of-3 multisig** address under your cryptographic co-control. GoMining cannot move them alone.
* An incoming multisig UTXO becomes spendable only after at least **5 confirmations** on the Bitcoin main chain, which protects against chain reorganizations.
* At settlement, the authorized amount moves on-chain. Any residual value above that amount and the network fee returns as change to the same multisig, so it stays self-custodied.

#### Settlement transactions

The customer's latest authorized amount settles in its own compact Bitcoin transaction, grouped with other users' transactions into a block GoMining mines itself. Because every settlement transaction is a standard, independently valid Bitcoin transaction, GoMining absorbs and amortizes the on-chain fee across the whole batch, which is why customers pay no network fee.

### See also

* [White Paper](https://gobtcpay.com/docs/BTC_Instant_v1_3_0.pdf): sections 5 (POS flow), 6 (settlement), 7 (recovery)


---

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