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Other => Beginners & Help => Topic started by: HodorHodl on January 12, 2018, 05:47:48 PM



Title: Transferring very small amounts of Bitcoin - fees?
Post by: HodorHodl on January 12, 2018, 05:47:48 PM
Hi all,

I've been looking at collecting up a number of very small amounts of Bitcoin I have lying around in various wallets, and combining them into one wallet.

I'm a little worried about the transaction fees though....I don't understand well how they work, but transaction fee charts that I found show insane numbers ($28 average fee). This makes it impractical for me to transfer what would probably be considered dust.

In the longer term, I'd like to also know more about how transferring between exchanges and cashing out is impacted by this. (BitPanda -> exchange -> another exchange -> BitPanda -> out).

Am I missing a trick?

All advice appreciated.


Title: Re: Transferring very small amounts of Bitcoin - fees?
Post by: AdolfinWolf on January 12, 2018, 05:58:36 PM
Hi all,

I've been looking at collecting up a number of very small amounts of Bitcoin I have lying around in various wallets, and combining them into one wallet.

I'm a little worried about the transaction fees though....I don't understand well how they work, but transaction fee charts that I found show insane numbers ($28 average fee). This makes it impractical for me to transfer what would probably be considered dust.

In the longer term, I'd like to also know more about how transferring between exchanges and cashing out is impacted by this. (BitPanda -> exchange -> another exchange -> BitPanda -> out).

Am I missing a trick?

All advice appreciated.


No, this is indeed quite normal. You're sending lots of small amounts of bitcoin from different adresses. ( or simply different UTXOS), which greatly ramps up the amount of bytes your transaction is, and thus the amount of fees it'll take for you to transfer the funds.

Quote
In the longer term, I'd like to also know more about how transferring between exchanges and cashing out is impacted by this. (BitPanda -> exchange -> another exchange -> BitPanda -> out).
What exactly do you mean by this? I'd recommend using an altcoin if you're going to transfer money between exchanges. This greatly reduces the fees. ( Something like Ethereum or Litecoin.)


The best thing you can do now ( in my opinion) is combine all your small UTXO's into one transaction, send them to an exchange adress with a fee of ~25sat/byte, and either use https://pool.viabtc.com/tools/txaccelerator/ or ask someone here in all these services threads to "accelerate"/speed up your transaction.

Then exchange them to an altcoin which has cheaper tx fees to then sent them to the next exchange?


Title: Re: Transferring very small amounts of Bitcoin - fees?
Post by: XavierSPL on January 12, 2018, 06:07:24 PM




The best thing you can do now ( in my opinion) is combine all your small UTXO's into one transaction, send them to an exchange adress with a fee of ~25sat/byte, and either use https://pool.viabtc.com/tools/txaccelerator/ or ask someone here in all these services threads to "accelerate"/speed up your transaction.

Then exchange them to an altcoin which has cheaper tx fees to then sent them to the next exchange?

I'm also confused on this one, would you mind elaborating on this? When you say "combine into 1 transaction" how do you do that? Thanks


Title: Re: Transferring very small amounts of Bitcoin - fees?
Post by: HodorHodl on January 12, 2018, 06:10:50 PM
Same as Xavier :)

Sounds like something workable, but I don't know how to actually do that. Would you have a link or anything that could help?

Thank you!!


Title: Re: Transferring very small amounts of Bitcoin - fees?
Post by: dothebeats on January 12, 2018, 06:15:24 PM
Tried that and have collected over 1.86BTC in dust lying around several wallets I was able to recover but I realized that even the smallest fee I need to pay outweighs the amount that I'm actually going to send (0.3BTC). Long story short, if you want to transfer coins around, just earn until you have something significant. Dust outputs are a problem and needs a lot of fees for you to spend them. As for your plan on cashing out, that's expensive and not viable in the long run. Why not directly send the coins on an exchange that you desire to cash out?


Title: Re: Transferring very small amounts of Bitcoin - fees?
Post by: AdolfinWolf on January 12, 2018, 06:17:23 PM




The best thing you can do now ( in my opinion) is combine all your small UTXO's into one transaction, send them to an exchange adress with a fee of ~25sat/byte, and either use https://pool.viabtc.com/tools/txaccelerator/ or ask someone here in all these services threads to "accelerate"/speed up your transaction.

Then exchange them to an altcoin which has cheaper tx fees to then sent them to the next exchange?

I'm also confused on this one, would you mind elaborating on this? When you say "combine into 1 transaction" how do you do that? Thanks

This depends on the wallet you're using, but with Electrum you can do this by importing the private keys of all the adresses holding small amounts, then simply hit CTRL(?) in the coins tab, and you can select multiple balances from adresses you want to send from.

There's a good guide here, https://freedomnode.com/blog/78/how-to-sweep-bitcoin-dust-to-a-single-wallet-address-with-electrum

Then simply choose the receivers adress and the prefered fees, ( would recommend to keep it low. )



Title: Re: Transferring very small amounts of Bitcoin - fees?
Post by: HodorHodl on January 12, 2018, 06:24:47 PM
Thank you Adolfin! That's what I needed exactly :)


Title: Re: Transferring very small amounts of Bitcoin - fees?
Post by: XavierSPL on January 12, 2018, 06:28:01 PM

 Yes, thanks for that - I have electrum but haven't used it yet, great info!


Title: Re: Transferring very small amounts of Bitcoin - fees?
Post by: katalol on January 12, 2018, 06:37:35 PM
Tried that and have collected over 1.86BTC in dust lying around several wallets I was able to recover but I realized that even the smallest fee I need to pay outweighs the amount that I'm actually going to send (0.3BTC). Long story short, if you want to transfer coins around, just earn until you have something significant. Dust outputs are a problem and needs a lot of fees for you to spend them. As for your plan on cashing out, that's expensive and not viable in the long run. Why not directly send the coins on an exchange that you desire to cash out?
We like to coin safe than in the wallet offline, sorry I do not know what to call it
 I know some the major exchange have been death, for example: btc-e




Title: Re: Transferring very small amounts of Bitcoin - fees?
Post by: seeya999 on January 12, 2018, 06:56:01 PM




The best thing you can do now ( in my opinion) is combine all your small UTXO's into one transaction, send them to an exchange adress with a fee of ~25sat/byte, and either use https://pool.viabtc.com/tools/txaccelerator/ or ask someone here in all these services threads to "accelerate"/speed up your transaction.

Then exchange them to an altcoin which has cheaper tx fees to then sent them to the next exchange?

I'm also confused on this one, would you mind elaborating on this? When you say "combine into 1 transaction" how do you do that? Thanks

This depends on the wallet you're using, but with Electrum you can do this by importing the private keys of all the adresses holding small amounts, then simply hit CTRL(?) in the coins tab, and you can select multiple balances from adresses you want to send from.

There's a good guide here, https://freedomnode.com/blog/78/how-to-sweep-bitcoin-dust-to-a-single-wallet-address-with-electrum

Then simply choose the receivers adress and the prefered fees, ( would recommend to keep it low. )




Wouldn't multiple address transfers collect individual fees making the transaction still super expensive ? If I understood correctly he wants to use multiple wallets with little amount of BTC in them. I would say to hold the funds until the txn fee issues are solved


Title: Re: Transferring very small amounts of Bitcoin - fees?
Post by: achki on January 12, 2018, 07:01:15 PM
Actually some wallet collect fines or fees depend on the amount of bitcoin your going to transfer... So if you transfer small amount then you will Be expecting a small fee of course....


Title: Re: Transferring very small amounts of Bitcoin - fees?
Post by: odolvlobo on January 12, 2018, 07:05:13 PM
Wouldn't multiple address transfers collect individual fees making the transaction still super expensive ? If I understood correctly he wants to use multiple wallets with little amount of BTC in them. I would say to hold the funds until the txn fee issues are solved

The key is that you send all the dust in one transaction with a very low fee to a single address (preferably a segwit address). The transaction will take a long time to confirm, so you must plan ahead.

As for waiting "until the txn fee issues are solved", I don't expect that to ever happen.


Title: Re: Transferring very small amounts of Bitcoin - fees?
Post by: chaki1992 on January 12, 2018, 07:12:54 PM
You question is like same with sending money to your love ones
Your transaction fee is based on the range amount  of money you will be sending...
It's like sending money fee is as follows:

All amount in USD

Amount.                  Fee
1 to 300                  . 96
301-599                    2
600 -  999.                9


It will come like this...


Title: Re: Transferring very small amounts of Bitcoin - fees?
Post by: AdolfinWolf on January 12, 2018, 07:32:00 PM



Wouldn't multiple address transfers collect individual fees making the transaction still super expensive ? If I understood correctly he wants to use multiple wallets with little amount of BTC in them. I would say to hold the funds until the txn fee issues are solved

Wouldn't multiple address transfers collect individual fees making the transaction still super expensive ? If I understood correctly he wants to use multiple wallets with little amount of BTC in them. I would say to hold the funds until the txn fee issues are solved

The key is that you send all the dust in one transaction with a very low fee to a single address (preferably a segwit address). The transaction will take a long time to confirm, so you must plan ahead.

As for waiting "until the txn fee issues are solved", I don't expect that to ever happen.

Indeed, or ask someone in this forum to accelerate your transaction, there's currently dozens of threads out there, here, https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=52.0. I'm not sure how many of them are simply baiting for donations/posts,, but by the looks of it it seems that some of them actually are working.. Worth a try aslong as they are out there, right?

Alternatively you can do it yourself as i stated in one of my previous posts by using https://pool.viabtc.com/tools/txaccelerator/, although this accelerator is usually full after a few seconds.

You can try to add your transaction again every hour.