Bitcoin Forum

Bitcoin transaction fee is very high. Can we transfer BTC by converting    to any ETH or smart contract based coin and then transfer ? is this profitable ?

Yes it's better and you can use Litecoin too. Litecoin transaction fees are pretty cheap.

Like Alluro said, it can be done, however, you'd have to follow following steps:

1) open an account on a trusted exchange, generate a BTC deposit address
2) deposit BTC to the exchange... You'd still face a big tx fee when depositing your funds. The exchange might, or might not ask for a deposit fee
3) exchange BTC to an altcoin like ETH or LTC. The exchange allmost always asks for an exchange fee
4) withdraw your altcoin either directly to the receiver, or to your own altcoin wallet. You'll need to pay for a withdrawal fee which might or might not be higher than the actual miner's fee payed by the exchange

IF you want the altcoin to be converted back to BTC, you'll have to follow the procedure again, but now deposit the alt, exchange to btc and withdraw the btc.

As for your question wether it's profitable: it CAN be... If you're going to pay a lot of people, and they're accepting the altcoin in question, you might save a ton on transaction fees... Also, if the alt's price rises compared to BTC's price, you might be able to book a profit (keep in mind the relative price might also drop in comparison to bitcoins)... However, keep in mind that exchanging BTC to ALT's also costs extra transaction fees, deposit fees, withdrawal fees and exchange fees... So if those costs are higher than the potential profit, you're at a loss.
Also, exchanges can go bancrupt or turn scam pretty easily.

Yes, this is a well-known strategy which is done by many people. If you need to transfer your BTC from one exchange to another, instead of directly withdrawing BTC you can follow these steps:

1. Trade Bitcoin to another coin which has less fees (for example DOGE) on exchange #1
2. Withdraw DOGE from exchange #1 to exchange #2
3. Trade DOGE to BTC on exchange #2

You can save lots of money using this strategy instead of directly withdrawing Bitcoin.

Very good explanation. Thank you very mcuh

Others already stated the solution I will point out why are fees high so you will be able to understand a bit more about bitcoin and cryptocurrency in general.

When you send transaction, broadcast it, to the network those transactions come to one place and just wait for the next pickups. These pickups come within 10minutes and are called blocks. Its like there is a crowd out there and they are all waiting for one bus - so if more people come they can't enter the same bus at the same time so some will have to wait for another bus. So the bust driver take in the people who pay the most so he can make selection and he drives people to the other destination.

So basically blocks are this bus over here - they have their limit of 1mb and can't pick all of the transactions (when transaction enters the block it shows as confirmed). Bus driver are miners - they do really tough work by giving their hash power to mine these blocks and since there are many transactions they will most likely pickup ones with higher fees. Imagining this you now can see that in order to get your transaction confirmed faster you have to put high fee which is really painful thb as network is acting slow and expensive. There was an upgrade that should make bitcoin more cheap and faster to use but not many have taken this approach as its new so it will take time specially for exchanges to implement it - its called Lighting Network SegWit, I won't tell you that this is good nor that it is bad upgrade but rather you can search more about it if interested.

Yeah I myself am noticing that the transaction fees are super high! I don’t have very much bitcoin and trying to send smaller amounts ends up costing more then the amount im trying to send. Does coinbase let you convert to ETH?

Yes - you can go from Eth to BTC to LTC.  If you have a coinbase account you can also have a GDAX account.  GDAX is the actual exchange for coinbase.  If you use the limit order function to make the purchase it will not cost you anything to make the exchange. 

If you are on another exchange that allows you to trade BTC to Doge, it is pretty common and inexpensive to move around.

You mention profitable - not sure what you mean by that, it will cost money everytime you move your crypto from one exchange to another.  If you trade back and forth, you have the possibility of increasing your stake.  But most day traders I think end up breaking even or losing money.  I buy, store safely, and hold.

I don't think it is profitable.
 If you use crypto exchange sites (like bittrex, poloniex, ...), You must pay two kinds of fees:
- The first: when exchange bitcoin to other coins.
- The second: when you made a withdrawal request.
The best way I know is exchanging bitcoin to USDT then transfer to others.

This is my take on it too.There are currencies which have no fee when converted to them, like dogecoin as you say, this is probably the most efficient way to do it at the moment, unless your dealing with a big chunk of bitcoin, then the hassle might outweigh the fees you pay.

Indeed it is a good idea if your transaction size is of like $20-30.

Can they have a fee that is adjustable to the price? I think they are earning because of the volatility but the basis is from way below the price maybe $100?

Too unfair..why are they not adjusting the fee? like in yobit  :-[ :-[ :-[ i need to learn to convert to other alts. many computations

There's a google which can we find about the comparison of the fees of different exchanges right? This does matter if you are going to buy just small amount. for big traders it's nothing

Can you provide me with details how reliable is USDT because I hear to many shady things about their company. Since it is centralized they can "print more money" than they have - issue more tokens and also we have to trust them that they can give 1:1 ratio for dollar. Imagine if they had a 'security" breach or something similar where will it end up then. So please provide me more details about why do you trust them as I am uncertain if I ever wish to buy it and transfer value via them - there are to many concerns about it with bad reviews on the internet.

thats a good idea to convert to alts like dogecoin,

If you want to transfer money with low fee and recommend that you should use Litecoin and it has smooth for transferring on its network

It's extremely profitable actually. Lets say i want to send 50$ to X, and i have them stored on bittrex.

Bittrex charges a flat fee of 0.001BTC, which already is ~30% ontop of the amount i'm trying to sent.

So instead of doing that, i transfer BTC  to an altcoin, send the altcoin to a poloniex adress, reverse the altcoin to bitcoin, and make a BTC output on poloniex, where they only charge me 0.0001BTC == 3% of my transaction.

Bookmaker fees are 0.3%-0.2%, which is barely anything.

There is nothing unfair about this. This is the world you've entered. You cannot have both the advantages of cryptocurrencies AND the advantages of a government insured exchanges; you can't have the great growth that comes with a new disruptive technology AND the security and fine-tuned UX that comes with than an established industry.

wow. i never thought about that. a simple great idea, it really surprised me that i never thought that strategy. I was thinking about it so many times about how big this bitcoin transaction fees. how can't I figured it out? I feel stupid right now really. thank you pal for your thread. It save my head from thinking bitcoin transaction fees.  ;)

I was searching around the forum to find a place to hold my BTC which charges lower transaction fee; seems like i'm gonna have to use this workaround around instead.
Several steps to save a lot of fee. Thanks for the tips!

If you dont have HUGE amounts of bitcoin, this is probably the best way to go.
Be careful about holding your BTC in an exchange also, from what I've been reading holding it in an offline wallet or another hot wallet is safer.

Well, I have like less than $1k worth of btc in coinbase and I can't exchange them to any other coin as I am from Malaysia and coinbase does not allow me to buy/sell/exchange crypto due to "country not supported".
Probably gonna leave it there for the time being.