Bitcoin Forum

Most of my initially received bitcoins were from faucets and therefore, these ended up being dust transactions. Since then, I've bought some bitcoins which are not dust.

Now I'm trying to send 0.0005 BTC to test out Blockchain.info's "receive payment API" (http://blockchain.info/api/api_receive) PHP example (https://github.com/blockchain/receive_payment_php_demo).  But Bitcoin-QT is telling me that I must pay 0.0005 BTC transaction fee.

I found out that the fee is due to the dust transactions.  Now, I like to get rid of these dust transactions by combining their amounts.  Can anyone suggest an easy way to do this?

I was thinking of installing Armory and then transferring all of my bitcoins from my Bitcoin-QT wallet, in one transaction, to my Armory wallet.  Will this eliminate the dust transactions by combining all of my dust amounts together?  Will my new Armory wallet contain just one input transaction, and not over a dozen transactions of small amounts?

Yes they'd combine.

There's also this
https://github.com/petertodd/dust-b-gone

Thanks for your answer.  Will there be a transaction fee to doing it the Armory way or the dust-b-gone way?

Yes, it will, but it's not economical. the reason is that the transaction for consolidating all the dust will still be large (in size), so you will still have to pay a fee. furthermore, the fee you pay to consolidate the dust will be the same as the fee for spending the dust in a normal transaction. Therefore you're not making any savings by sending all your dust to one address.

Also keep in mind that dust-b-gone sends the dust to the miner, not to yourself.

Thanks for your input.  These dust transactions are much more of pain than they are worth.  There should be warnings everywhere that these faucets give out micro amounts and these micro amounts will cost you way more in fees to spend them, than they are worth.  I thought these faucets were originally there to let people dip their toes in the Bitcoin water or to get some bitcoins for free first in order to test them out.  Instead, they seem more of a scam by malicious dicks.  Am I wrong?

Is there any way of consolidating these dust amounts without paying the transaction fee?

You can try sending the transaction without a fee and hope for the best - it could take a day or more though. And it's possible that the transaction is never mined into a block.

No, you are not wrong.


Yes, but it isn't easy. It takes a lot of patience, and a decent amount of technical knowledge.

You can use low fees and hope. You won't lose it.

And faucets are starting to use offchain merging.

Thanks for your input.  How can I try to send the transaction without a fee?  Bitcoin-QT tells me there is a fee and it shows only two buttons:  Cancel or Yes.

What does it mean if the transaction is never mined into a block?  Does it mean that I will lose the bitcoins in that transaction?

check the sticky: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=232979.0

If it's not put with a mined block no it will never go through. There is a way to cancel the transaction though but my recollection is that I takes a couple days otherwise the network thinks you are trying to double spend.

You could do manual coin control and always put one or two dust outputs with your regular transactions that you pay a fee for.

Thanks for your suggestion.  I searched for "manual coin control of bitcoin" but couldn't find anything relevant to this.  Can you provide a link or explanation of how to do this?

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=144331.0

Let's say I do the following:

1.  Install Armory.
2.  Send all of my bitcoins, which will include the dust amounts, in one transaction from my Bitcoin-QT wallet to my Armory wallet, and pay the transaction fee.

After doing the above, am I correct to assume that my Armory wallet should not have any dust transactions?  When I want to send/spend normal amounts of bitcoins (such as 0.001 BTC or 0.0001 BTC) from my Armory wallet, am I correct to assume that I should not be charged a transaction fee because I do not have dust transactions in my Armory wallet?

yes, though i'm not sure about the mandatory fee policy with sub 0.01 BTC transactions. They should have been removed with the previous patch.