Bitcoin Forum

Hey, I want to send bitcoins and it won't let me saying: "insufficient funds" when I clearly have more bitcoins that I want to send. Any help?

Which wallet is that? How did you download the wallet? I mean the site URL that you downloaded it from.

If it is not a fake or scam wallet, you can import the wallet seed phrase on Electrum (https://electrum.org/) to see your balance to know if truly you still have the coins or not.

Judging by the lack of information, I wouldn't be surprised if OP had someone create a watch-only wallet for him.

Did you considered the transaction fee ? For example, if you own 0.1 BTC, you cannot send 0.1 BTC to another address, you have to deduct the transaction fee of your balance.

As the others said, please give us more information, which wallet you used, and about the transaction, thus it will be more easy to help you.

A BTC wallet will only provide an insufficient funds error message when the balance of the sending address is insufficient to cover the transaction's fees or the wallet is yet to fully sync when you try to send the BTC. Another thing that can cause is if there's something wrong with the wallet and for this reason, it will be nice if the OP provides an answer to the question previous ask by the above users.

The wallet isn't specified but I know one wallet which is notorious of giving that specific error, Blockchain's online wallet.
Sadly, those who experienced that error had to contact their customer support or import their recovery phrase to a wallet that supports BIP39 seed.

Please consider reading this sticky topic before asking for support: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1741772.0 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1741772.0)

Assuming that it is the Electrum wallet, which is known to make this kind of error message among other wallets, the error can also happen if the SPV servers haven't finished sending transaction data to the Electrum client, in which case the UTXO set (and thereby the balance) may wildly higher or lower than the actual balance of the addresses of the blockchain.


You'd have to go out of your way to make a watch-only wallet vs. just a few clicks of creating a regular wallet in most software.

It's still a very common way to scam someone. The scammer either talks them through setting up a watch only wallet, or sends them a pre-created watch only wallet so the user thinks they own the funds inside.

If a user understands the difference between making a regular wallet and a watch only wallet, then they wouldn't fall for the scam in the first place.

insufficient funds is a problem that was reported so much by Blockchain.com users that I found this screenshot from this thread https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5259913.0

https://www.talkimg.com/images/2023/06/16/HaACd.png

If this is your problem, then you have enough reason to switch to a good open source wallet like Electrum.

With a quick Google search, I found that two or three wallets can give the same error, but I think you are using Blockchain.com.



watch-only wallets give you an error like (this wallet is watch-only wallet this means you will not be able to spend bitcoins with)

And the OP has not come back. Not wanting to be 'that guy' but going to be him anyway. Should we start adopting the same policy of the scam accusations section where we encourage people to post TX and other errors in a standard(ish) format?

Otherwise like here we have have a dozen posts with nothing but speculation and no real help for anyone.

There have been a lot of posts like this over time and they all seem to end up the same way.

-Dave

Another possibility is that he has a lot of small UTXOs and the fee to spend them is very high.

I'll join: it looks like a hit&run account indeed, it went offline the second this topic was created. The username looks spammy too.

The error message us self explanatory : you are trying to send more than you own. Depending on the wallet you use, this is either because you are trying to send more than what you have (usually because you don't pay to the wallet's default unit), or because your wallet doesn't deduct the fees to pay from the amount to be sent and you have to do that manually.
Usually, you aren't supposed to face any of these problems with reputable wallets.

Isn't the sticky topics here like this one (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1741772.0) enough already? Newbies aren't paying attention to that already, and I don't think any additional "policy" would change anything.

If a help request lacks details because a newbie might have no clue what is important to solve a problem, one could simply ask for more details or speculate around, if the user's issue isn't quite obvious. That it is bad style by OP to post and not return after various replies have been given, is another story, unfortunately not uncommon.

I like the welcoming way some of the more experienced users here stoically answer (newbie) questions even when the lack of details in some questions is screaming. It reminds me to calm down and not rant like a bastard admin from hell.  ;D

I once got an error message on Trustwallet (yes, I know I shouldn't use this wallet anymore  ;D), but it was simply because I hadn't updated the wallet. But I had to rack my brains to find out what the problem was.