Bitcoin Forum

I want to transfer my BTC from one address to another (both are mine), how do I avoid paying the transaction fee?

It's impossible.
As long as it's an on-chain transaction, you MUST pay miner fees.
The bitcoin protocol does not know -- or care -- that both addresses belong to you.

Fortunately, bitcoin transaction fees are very low right now and even 2 sat/byte transactions have been confirmed within a few blocks.
https://twitter.com/alansilbert/status/957949679156846593

You cant avoid paying the transaction fee but you can avoid paying HIGH transaction fees by doing these below

1) Wait for the network to be less congested (At midnight or during the weekend) this is often when the transaction fee will go down

2) Go to  btc.com and check the lastest transaction fee .Compare the prices and decide when is the best time to transfer.

3) Change a wallet to a wallet called Mycelium that allows you to set different prices for Transaction Fees that ranges from low-priority to high

In short, there is no way to AVOID paying anything but with some methods u can avoid paying HIGH fees

Theoretically, there IS a way to avoid paying fees. This is achieved simply by not including a miner's fee in your transaction. You'd be extremely unlikely to ever get it confirmed though, unless you intervene by somehow getting it submitted to a miner to include it. Deliberately sending low or zero fees is not good behaviour though. Just learn to pay what you need to.


I don't think it makes a difference at time of day, or time of week. The mempool's current state doesn't really shift very much, and fee sampling wouldn't be affected by such short spikes or letdowns in usage. Maybe I'm wrong but I don't see a significant effect when mempool is at this size anyway.

It's not reliable to use a wallet's inbuilt dynamic fee or priority fee - they are all estimates and can be wildly inaccurate as they don't seem to adjust well to network congestion. Better to learn to set your own fees manually, using a fee structure you determine on your own.

For the most part, if you are moving BTC you can not avoid paying the transaction fee.

But if you are using a centralised service like paxful wallet, it is very much possible to transfer BTC from one paxful wallet to another paxful wallet without paying the transaction fee as the transaction is not actually registered on the blockchain.

It is impossible to transfer BTC from one address to another without paying fees,  that too now the fees being too high even if you need to transfer small amounts you need to pay high fees larger than amount you are transferring. If you have two of the accounts in coinbase exchange you can do it literally for free by just inserting the mail id. If there was no fees, people would just spam bitcoin transaction ;D I think lightning network will help us out by minimizing the fees to large extent and making it free of cost for paying only once in the beginning and in the end while withdrawing funds by setting up a payment channel. Hope LN strikes soon.  :)

The transfer fee of transfer btc to another wallet cost much. The lower the amount the higher the cost of transfer

You can move your private key from one wallet into a different wallet by exporting and importing it, but what you want is to move funds from two different private keys. Even if you own both private keys, as far as I know this is impossible outside of a transaction (with it's required fee), otherwise it would break bitcoin, as people would be able to move funds around without paying the miners.


Even with LN you will still need to pay a fee to fill the channel with coins, and the LN fee which is minimal. Actually I learned that it can be negative and you can make some money while sending an LN transaction.


I wonder when was the last time that a 0 fee transaction was ever mined successfully? This would be an interesting stat to know. I guess after 2012 it was just impossible, probably earlier.

The problem is persuading miners to include your transaction. Also, I understand that the later releases of core don't relay zero fee transaction. I seem to remember that there are a couple of specialist nodes that will relay zero fee transction, but I can't remember their addresses. Expect your transaction to take up to  month to confirm though. I haven't tried this, but it's something I plan to do when I've sync'd my Linux wallet.

Last 24 hours there were 10 such txs confirmed according to one aggregate, so it's definitely still possible! I imagine at least in one situation where this might happen: a miner performs a low priority zero fee transaction and simply includes it in their block. Here's one from just 7 days ago: https://blockchain.info/tx/06d89bb591064c0c807ad2edb27656b49d4dae2f60181781d19b9939e7a09b8c

For "standard" txs... I can't seem to locate older posts where someone had tried this, or my own posts where I've done it for testing purposes but definitely as recently as last year, first quarter when I was learning how to use Electrum. I don't have those wallets anymore so can't even look them up. Initially I thought latter versions disabled zero fees but someone told me around v2.9 that it was still possible, and when I checked he was right.

I also recall using the antpool acceleration service to successfully help confirm a few zero fee txs - all this when mempool was nearly empty.

Impressive.
According to Bitaps (https://bitaps.com/06d89bb591064c0c807ad2edb27656b49d4dae2f60181781d19b9939e7a09b8c), the transaction was confirmed in less than a minute.

1.pick whatever cryptocurrency has enough amount you need and low fees AND is accepted by the exchange where you want to spend it – like ETH (nowadays bit slower), LTC (faster)
2.send it to the exchange
3.then exchange the amount of BTC you just send in other coin into that coin (exchanged BTC into ETH)
4.in the exchange where you send the alt coin (ETH) in my case – buy whatever you wanted originally with it or exchange it back to BTC / USD and buy with that
5.there – you just saved yourself about $7.6 in fees 🙂
Another option is to use a wallet like Mycelium. There you can choose to pay a lower fee if you accept that your transaction will take longer.

Basically, if you want that to happen then you could that there could be a transfer of fee that is going to happen because miners are never going to confirm your transaction. Because that is how miners do they earnings here and we live on a world where there is no free from every services we would made.

There is no way that you can avoid paying fees on any transaction as the miner doesn't know that the wallets are your so if ones the transaction gets into a block then the fees has to be paid in order to make transaction successful. Also, there is a option of 0$ fee but if you about that approach then you would know that this might take forever to get transferred or even would never be transferred . So, its better to pay fee if you want your money to be confirmed and transferred successfully.

Transferring fund in different wallet would need to pay for transaction fee, you can not avoid that. You can only do is to lessen the transaction fee by using segwit address. Also i think you know what transaction fee is for, this would be a fee for miners to confirm your transaction and this is the basis of how long your transaction to be confirmed.

If both addresses are on Coinbase, you can transfer it with email address. It won't cost any transaction fee. I don't know whether doing so will increase the transaction data size later or not though. Learning how to calculate transaction data size is still on my to do list. Please help if anybody knows where to search it.

Do you have access to your private keys?
Easy way make export keys.. and import it to new wallet.