Bitcoin Forum

Good Day everyone:

There are many sites out there offering what they call 'Free BTM' for clicking ads or whatever task they have you do.
There is nothing wrong with this, it can be fun, it is legit, however there is something you need to be aware of.

Whenever you send Bitcoin; there is a FEE attached to the transaction.  The formula for determining this fee can get complicated, but nonetheless, there is a FEE.

The number of transactions you have accumulated receiving all these 'free' bit coins will ADD to this FEE.

Let's say you spent 4 months clicking hundreds if not thousands of times on this add that add, whatever.
Let's say you finally accumulated 90 Mbtc ( 0.090 ) BTC.
Let's say you accumulated this money over a span of 400 incoming transactions to your 'wallet'.

Now you want to send / spend that money somewhere so you go to send that 90 Mbtc off somewhere.

SURPRISE SURPRISE.

Now you find that to send that 90 mBTC you will need to pay a FEE of  25.5 mBTC because of the 'size' of the transaction, because of all those tiny inputs to your wallet.
NO, I did NOT mis read the fee,  it is correct.  Over 28 percent fee to use that money you earned.

If you wait a while... weeks.... months... the fee may go down a bit because of the 'age' of the money raises its priority in the system.

If you actually FUND your wallet with BTC derived from another source, say you converted Yen to BTC and put 50 BTC in your wallet, then yes; that fee is insignificant.
However if you are an individual that can easily fund your wallet with 50 BTC then chances are you are not wasting hours and hours of time clicking for micro btc inputs to begin with.

It is what it is, I am just giving you foresight right now that, if you are an individual who is clicking the sites for the little bits they hand out, you might be in for a real eye opener when you actually go to use that money you accumulated. 

I am going to let this run a bit, I am going to stop accepting inputs to this wallet, and see if the fee goes down and how much over how long.

Aaron.

Honestly I've been building up slowly from the faucets and earn sites to the point I have about .4 BTC that I'm now investing, and I've yet to pay more than .0005 when I moved the coins around, then again using Electrum I have some input in what I pay for the fee.

Same for Bitcoin-Qt. I set the base fee payment to 25000 satoshi (or BTC0,00025) per transaction, and the client warns me if a larger fee (usually BTC0,0005) is required.

So do you two have a wallet with these companies holding it for you and you access it thru their site, or running one on your own machine?

Aaron

I use Bitcoin-Qt on my own computer, although I happen to have a blockchain.info wallet too (and it's empty at the moment). I draw free BTC from Dailybitcoins and delay the payments to maximize efficiency/minimize transaction fees.

Is there a way to merge the tiny inputs into a single larger input?

yes, send the balance to a single address (and pay the fee).

I could be wrong, but I'm fairly certain that Electrum stores the wallet.dat file on the local machine.  I poked around in the folder a bit and seem to remember seeing one.

The private keys for electrum is held in one's local machine. The cloud part of the system merely assists in the procurement of the blockchain, where one doesn't need to download it as opposed to bitcoin-qt. The only risk would be the existence of malicious systems where a forged blockchain is fed to the user, and thus fools the user in thinking he has more/less bitcoins than he actually has. No actual loss of bitcoin should be possible as far as I know.

Ah.  Well thanks for the clarification. :) That does explain why it's theoretically recoverable as long as you know the private key.

Here's something I don't understand:

If I give all those websites the same Address, all the micropayments are going to bundle up into one single address. Then when making a payment myself with the collectd funds, the Input is going to be just one address, which means that I only have to pay a very tiny fee, Right?

Thank you! So, what matters are the Input transactions NOT the input addresses.

I just tried sending that .09 btc again and now the fee is down to .024 for sending them.  Maybe in 6 months it will be reasonable, or if I somehow luck into 20 btc i can throw on top of it and then that would cancel the fee then?

Aaron

Well im keeping my free btc wallet seperate from my paid in cash btc wallet.
In time i hope my free btc's will grow with value and let them sit for however, and maybe use them to do small investments with btc jam. But I dont think anyone wants my 70cents usd of btc, or maybe they do if its funded with other small amounts to get what they need.

The thing with these free btc sites is that there just isn't enough money in it. You'd be much better off doing some work on something like freelancer.com and then exchanging that for bitcoins imo. Or do one of the graphic design work websites - anybody can do a pretty picture or website design.