Bitcoin Forum

So I have paper wallets from 2014 and I really don't want to move them to segwit addresses. I made them with Armory and I am quite happy.

What are you doing with your older paper wallets? Are you happy to keep them on legacy addresses? What do you think the fees will be in a couple of years for legacy addresses? Admittedly 30-60 dollars is not that much for a largish transaction today. But what will the fees be later? Any guesses??

So if you have that wallet since 2014 it means that you are storing a huge amount of money right now, at which rate did you bought those bitcoins? Because the price was less than $250 by those times if my memory is not broken.


I didn't knew that the legacy addresses were still online, i thought that everybody who had bitcoins had already moved their funds to a segwit address.

Why dont you do it? Maybe you are going to pay $30 of fees right now, but in the future you will only have to pay less.

And if the lightning network gets implemented you will need to switch your balance to update to it.

Nobody knows what is going to happen with fees.

My guess is that alts will step up for use as a currency and to move money between exchanges, and that the only ones who will be sending coins on the bitcoin network will be those who own their own wallets. So the fee situation might resolve if people start working around bitcoin.

My brother asked me this yestearday beucase he bought a new ledger nano s thing and in the screen he had seen the device was asking for segwit or legacy blockchains. I told him to select segwit due to low fees.

Is there any chance to lose our bitcoin due to this selection in the future?

It's possible that he didn't buy much back then, but I agree that the odds are that the op has a good sum in that paper wallet right now.

@OP, if you don't want to move your money out of the paper wallet, you don't have to. Right now wouldn't really be an optimal time either -- there's a decent amount of fees going on right now because of the amount of transactions going through. I'm sure you know this, but I think there will be a nice pocket in time in the future where the fees go low again. It'll be pretty cyclical from what I'm thinking (moving between high and low).

There is a chance that your brother could lose whatever your whole family has stored in Bitcoin to a prostitute.
Beggars like me and Satoshi are keeping our coins on legacy addresses, well mostly Satoshi, because I don't even have 1BTC (note, did you know that now I could buy a small house to jump a prostitute (this is my first time, so I want to first experiment with a paid girl) with an amount less than 1BTC? 5 weeks ago it was 20BTC 3 weeks ago was 15BTC 2 weeks ago it was 1.5BTC, last week I begged people for 1BTC, now since I have no dignity, I'm begging you all for 0.9BTC.
OP if people want low fees, Segwit is there, it's not mandatory though.

If his descendants can't move those coins from that paper wallet in a century's time then Bitcoin as a concept will be a complete and utter failure.

It would be great to hear from more people as to what they are doing with their old legacy addresses. I am less inclined to move them just yet, certainly I am starting to think about moving them.Thanks for your responses.

Quite a few airdrops have required signed messages. You can't do that with Segwit. I've no need to move coins so they'll stay in legacy addresses for now. My most used wallet is Mycelium and I definitely would switch to Segwit if they implemented it but it might be a long wait.

it's not really worth considering because the difference between the segwit discount and the variance between mempool/spam attacks is negligible. right now, the segwit discount only ~ halves the required fees. at the very most, this could approach 4x in theory, but that's an edge case and is unlikely to happen outside of a literal computation attack intent on slowing down block processing across the network.

the fact of the matter is that fees will keep rising to replace the halving block subsidy over time. this applies to both standard and segwit addresses. in both cases, the fees i paid today vs. 3 weeks ago is a 40-fold difference. imo, that has nothing to do with legitimate transaction demand, but rather spam attacks. that's why i wouldn't worry about segwit vs. legacy.....at least not until LN takes off.

the fact of the matter is that fees will keep rising to replace the halving block subsidy over time. this applies to both standard and segwit addresses. in both cases, the fees i paid today vs. 3 weeks ago is a 40-fold difference. imo, that has nothing to do with legitimate transaction demand, but rather spam attacks. that's why i wouldn't worry about segwit vs. legacy.....at least not until LN takes off.
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Thanks, that is a helpful insight.

I *really* don't like touching my cold wallets. Leave them there nice and safe. Anytime you move the coins you risk making any number of mistakes.

On the other hand, if a vulnerability is discovered, like what happened with the original addresses, then it would make sense to move them to a more secure address. Transaction fees are unlikely to be an issue.

the fee you pay for transferring bitcoin does not matter much whether you are using a legacy address or a SegWit one. the difference is not that much. the way it works is that if more people start using them the total will help the scaling and will reduce the backlog and then fees can come down if number of unconfirmed transactions were not 100K-200K. otherwise you will still be paying the same 400 satoshi/bye for every transaction you make!

also in the future, fees won't go that high because people won't pay that much for a transaction anyways. imagine it costs you $100 to move bitcoin. nobody will do it so number of transactions will eventually diminish and fees will come down with it. otherwise people would simply stop using bitcoin and move on.

Not many airdrops worth claiming. I'm not touching my cold storage private keys for airdrops! I imagine BTG and BCH value will eventually plummet, but hey, I never thought BTC would go this far, this fast. Maybe they'll survive too. It's kinda cool having all the forks intact. :)

whats happens if you keep on old addresses? do they ever become obsolete, of need to be converted to segwit.

Considering that wallets and services continue to be stubborn about not implementing Segwit?  I'd say fees will grow worse than they are now.  But if you're holding over 5 BTC in a paper wallet, I wouldn't worry about 500 USD in fees.  Lol.  You're rich!  Pay the miners.  ;D

I guess it's conceivable this could really happen. I'm not sure which is more mind blowing at this moment in time, Bitcoin heading far into the tens of thousands or fees reaching the hundreds. I checked a not massively input heavy balance today which would take $60 to move low priority but that's probably down to crappy estimation.

Those unbanked Kazakh goat whisperers won't be able to access the global economy and do online goat whispering with Bitcoin after all for now at least.

Not necessarly. A lot of people thought bitcoin was dead after mtgox, so from 2014 to 2015 a lot of people saw bitcoin sit on that nice 150-300 USD range and nobody bought or nobody bought that much.

As far as fees goes... they will keep going up, since I don't see a blocksize increase anytime soon. And no, I wouldn't cold storage in segwit, too paranoid for that. You can still send transactions for like 4 bucks too (legacy transactions). I think people exaggerate when they say "it's $30 now". That must be during peak mempool times, recently I just spent 4 bucks on a transaction.

Fees are a bitch for everyone, but I'm guessing that many of the high fee screamers are people who gathered a shit ton of dust from sig campaigns, faucets and trading and only now figured out that's it data not value that costs.

What's the basis for your Segwit paranoia?

Well, signature campaigns can make you a couple hundred bucks with high level campaigns, so that could be a small business. So anyone making a couple hundred selling products and whatever in exchange of bitcoin is going to have a ton of different smaller payments, it's a problem. Of course faucets are out of the question. But then again, it depends. People used to get 1 BTC from faucets back then, so you could easily move that.. things self-balance over time as price goes up. Even smaller amounts, for a long time faucets used to give 0.1 BTC too, 0.05... 0.01.. these amounts are all decent to hold in an address. The problem is, once the price has gone up, if you are still getting small payments, you will be left with amounts that you can't barely move.

The segwit thing has been discussed extensively, it's the possibility of stolen funds by colluding miners basically. So better be safe than sorry, in case it happens, you want to have your cold storage in legacy addresses. What are the chances of it happening? I guess rather low, who knows. Everyone in Core denies it would ever happen.

Yes , has Bitcoin kind of screwed the unbanked goat whisperers? The unbanked may have small amounts in BTC that they cannot move now because of the fees. We sold them a promise and now they are screwed. Even with Lightning you will have to send your BTC to a payment channel, what will the fees be then. I am starting to question the motives of Blockstream.

I am not selling BTC , but I am no longer buying it either. It appears to be a less interesting project in the world of block chain tech. I am not convinced the Lightning Cult has the answers.

Nah, honestly I'm not that too worried about it.  Sooner or later somebody has to give way and start using the tech available to accomodate more transactions per block.  And better, a layer on top making lightning fast transactions possible, and get this...  It can scale!  ;)

Oi, come on now, no need to be elitist, even as a joke ;) I think the "upside" of this scaling issue, or fee problem anyway, is that people are being forced more and more to learn more about Bitcoin's tech... how to use it properly, how to be more in control, how it works... which is, arguably, the direction users should head towards to so they can help with forward adoption. I say this only because of my own experience. Perhaps if fees and confirmation times never became an issue for me, I'd never have learnt to use wallets properly. Perhaps without the fork threats (and events), I might never have needed to learn how to secure my coins.


I think that's right. We now see more services moving towards adopting Segwit (which is 5 months old almost now), and itself was a form of increasing block limits. Things will happen, naturally a lot more slowly than many would like, but necessity after all, is the mother of invention.

We all know that the main problem that we have right now with BTC is its very high transaction fees accompanied by high waiting time. These issues are being dealt with right now and one of the solutions given to us is to use the Segwit addresses. If we are presented with solutions to our current problem, we should use it right away especially when there will be no harm being done to us. I'm currently in the process of transferring my BTC to Segwit addresses in my Ledger Nano S.

After 2 years, if Legacy is still indeed functioning by then, I'm seeing a very high transaction fee in that chain to make a transfer. Its transaction time will also scale into a crazy longer period of waiting and this will definitely harm the system for BTC.

spam attacks aside---more than anything, i'm annoyed by bad fee estimation algos and political games. bitmex recommending upwards of 0.003 BTC to withdraw? unbelievable! most wallets defaulting to the highest possible fee, creating massive bottlenecks in fee rates? give me a break!

rusty russell (lightning developer) put it best; i'll have to paraphrase. "it's like a toll booth where the toll costs a quarter and everyone is chucking in a $5 bill!" what do you think this does to everyone else's fees? it drives everyone's fees up across the board, and drastically, due to the limited block space.

It is the same, i have a ledger wallet only for recovery purposes, if something happens to me, i do not want to move all my bitcoins to there (i am not storing them in there at the moment) but this is just only for preventions.

You need to know that they work by the same way, they are different chains but you can receive/send btc in there, only that the segwit addresses are cheaper, you can send bitcoins more fastly and without high fees (10% less than the legacy ones)


If your brother is on this forum and specially, on a signature campaign; let me tell you that he is going to get banned only for sharing wallet addresess and cheating the forum.


I hope that you are not doing that! Of course! But if you are one of the cheaters i would be in love to see how you get tagged in there.