Bitcoin Forum

I just tried to import a vanity address into blockchain.

I was about to transfer the coins when i noticed that the fee was about to be 0.04 or £240. Is there any reason why that would be so high? Is it because it's a vanity address?

Thanks

The reason has nothing to do with it being a vanity address.

Transaction fees are based on the size of a transaction in bytes. A transaction will be large if you are spending a lot of inputs in your transaction (i.e. you received many payments and are spending from those payments). So what probably happened is that you have received a lot of transactions and are now spending from them thus the size of your transaction is large. Thus your transaction fee will be large.

If you're getting fees, you're not importing the vanity address, you're sweeping the funds into your own wallet, which creates a transaction. If you want to be able to use the vanity address you'll have to find a way to import the private key directly into the wallet

Ah, i see.

So if i wanted to import the address into blockchain.info I could use it without paying the large fee?

I have always swept cold wallets as a matter of safety before after being told thats what i should do

Thanks again

There is no transaction made when you just import your address in a different client. So yes, there won't be any fee when you do that.

But you will still need to pay a fee anyway when you want to spend your coins in the future. A quick "fix" for this, would be to sweep all your balance to yourself (or to a new address) with a lower fee (which should take a few days to confirm, so do it when you won't need to spend them), to consolidate all the inputs into one single output. Then, when you need to send a transaction with a higher fee for faster confirmation, it will be cheaper since there won't be that many inputs increasing the transaction size.

That's good advice, and you should keep following it. You should sweep funds when you want the money that's in the address. However, if it's the address itself you need, then you'll have to import it directly into the wallet.

So the address is now in my imported addresses in my blockchain wallet.

I tried to send it to another wallet but it still says I ave to leave 0.04 free for the fees. Not sure how I work my way around that.

So, I am correct in thinking the address is still usable to receive funds?

That seems like a lot for fees. Are you using a different unit, like mBTC? And yes, if it is really in your wallet you can still use it to receive money. I would keep it in your old wallet if I were you, just in case.

Yeah, it has had 155 transactions is for a total of 2.25 BTC

I really never knew that the total in the wallet would need to have fees deducted if moved.

There's your answer. That's a lot of transactions by anyone's measure and that fee, rather grimly, doesn't sound too outrageous these days.

Doesn't blockchain.info give you any control over your fees? If it doesn't then you need to import into a wallet that does and then wait for a quiet period to put it through with a lower fee. Weekends tend to be better.

But surely the fees are paid by the people sending the money into the wallet? Why do i have to pay more to move it out of the wallet?

Maybe i'm just being completely dumb about the way Bitcoin works, I just have never had to deal with this before.

Nope. They paid their own fees to move the coins into your wallet. You're paying your fees to move them on again. Every time they move someone pays.

Fees are based on the size of the transaction in data terms, not the amount. Every incoming transaction adds more data that has to paid for when it moves again.

A 2000 BTC transaction with one input would attract less fees to move than a 0.02 BTC transaction with two inputs. You have a shitload. I've paid over £20 in fees a few times with 20-30 input transactions.

Fees are paid by the party which spends the coins. They are only paying the fees for their own transaction.
The way Bitcoin works is that transactions are spending inputs. In the transaction, each of the inputs and the outputs has a size to it. Hence, the more inputs there are, the larger your transaction will be, same for the outputs.

Judging by the amount of transactions you have, you are likely spending quite a lot of inputs. With that, the amount of inputs spent will mean that the transaction has a larger size. Transaction fees is based on the size of the transaction, ie. the larger the transaction, the more fees you'll pay.

Of course, you can choose a smaller fee but the confirmation would take a longer time.

In general, vanity addresses are uncompressed, so the transaction is slightly larger than when you send from a compressed address (which is the standard nowadays).

https://btc.com/stats/unconfirmed-tx currently says 60 sat/byte is enough for speed, but with 155 inputs you won't need speed. If it were me, I'd do it in small batches: take 10 inputs, say 2000 bytes, and send them to your own address. Pay no more than 0.2mBTC fee. In general, fees are lowest on Sundays, and with 2.25 BTC and 155 inputs I dont thinkyou're in a hurry.
Do this 16 times, and you've paid a total of 0.003BTC in fees.

I "disagree" with wallets that by default set a high fee, that's just a race to get ever increasing fees. Great for miners, but the network is still congested.

For what it's worth: I do this on a daily basis: whenever I make a transaction anyway, I choose which inputs to use ("coin control"), and make sure I don't end up with many small inputs for a long time. This way I don't have to pay a rediculous fee if I'm in a hurry to send my funds.
My example (https://blockchain.info/tx/6ab28b9463e3c4452f110c524cb6f6e3b472d1cc5e748a2bf06b9c2a41e9f11e) with 10 sat/byte fee last Sunday.

Bitcoin isn't very intuitive when it comes to fees, but it's easier to understand when you look at it as buying a car with small coins.

@LoyceV, recent vanitygen defaults to compressed addresses, as early as 2013. Maybe people are downloading old versions or something.

@OP, if you really have > 2 BTC, you can afford to learn more about how BTC works, and it would not be a bad idea to install the reference client Bitcoin Core. If you don't have the space, maybe now is a good time to upgrade your hard drive or computer.

Also, avoid that cross posting, the bulls in that other thread have horns, and the bears have really big teeth.

How do i choose which inputs i send??

It's strange, I consider myself a bit of an expert on most things Bitcoin. In terms of security and wallet management etc. I have just never come up against this before. I normally just sweep cold wallets into an online wallet when needed.

Thanks for the advice regarding the WO. I have been on the site since 2013 just recently had my account hacked. (Wish i paid as much attention to account security as I do to my BTC, at least its not the other way around.  ;) )

Are you sure about that? I'm using vanitygen (https://github.com/samr7/vanitygen), last updated 5 years ago.
I know the much more recent vanitygen-plus (https://github.com/exploitagency/vanitygen-plus) supports compressed addresses, but I'm very conservative in what software I trust.

I can't tell you how blockchain.info works, in Bitcoin Core it's simply clicking "Inputs" after enabling coin control features (under Settings). I'm pretty sure Electrum can do this too.

Then you should know about coin control, add that to your "to learn" list. :) You don't need to be a dev, just understand all these things about unspent inputs.


I asked someone on the thread to compile one that supports compressed addresses, maybe it was a fork. Yeah, it was some other guy, had him GPG sign the SHA256 cuz it's Windows. Another one, I think Lifeboat Foundation, made a GPU version that also supports compressed addresses.

There shouldn't be any reason to use uncompressed addresses anymore.

You consider yourself an expert on Bitcoin security and you're attempting to put 2.25 BTC onto Blockchain.info? ??? :o That's the opposite of both "expert" and "security" :P ::)


You can't select inputs on Blockchain.info... it has no coin-control features. B.info is a "Bitcoin for Dummies" wallet, where they make it as simple as possible for faucet collectors and cloud miners to pay outrageous fees to move their 10's/100's of dust sized transactions to whatever HYIP site they're trying to lose their coins on :P

- If you have already swept the coins in b.info, your only way out is to just send them all to a "proper" wallet like Bitcoin Core or Electrum... and hope that the "custom fee" thing in b.info is still working... set a fee of at least 11 sats/byte or 0.00010001 BTC/kB (to allow for transaction size errors) and then use transaction accelerators like ViaBTC and AntPool.
- If you just imported the private key, then all is not lost... simply install and setup Bitcoin Core or Electrum and import the vanity address private key there and you'll have access to the coin control features and custom fees.

If you want lightweight like an "online" wallet but with access to advanced features (custom fees + coin control etc) then get Electrum.

Haha, true. Maybe I should start using Electrum to sweep my cold wallets then.