Bitcoin Forum

Hi all, newbie to the forums here.  ;D
I've been in Crypto for four years, but I've recently seen the light on BTC.
(wish it had been sooner!)
Anyhow, here's my dilema: I've been slowly accumulating Satoshis this year, and I also bought a cold storage wallet recently.  I tried today to move a small amount of BTC to the wallet as a "test" transaction to insure it went to the designated wallet, but the fee was a lot of money in my opinion.

Should I just send everything and hope it gets there?
Or wait until the fees go down (will they go down? I'm using CDC as the custodial exchange atm.)
Normally, I always do a test transfer on new wallets, but the fee is almost the same amount I bought this week!..
Any thoughts?
Thanks in advance for your thoughts & ideas....

The fees are not really that high right now as you can see here[1]. The main problem here is the transaction size that is too big because you've been receiving multiple small amounts throughout the year.

EDIT: missed the exchange part. Very a few exchanges have dynamic fees. If you're been using a custodial exchange wallet, then it probably doesn't matter. The fees are going to remain the same

[1] https://mempool.space/

What exactly is the CDC exchange you mean?
If the satoshis you that you collected and received it to some exchanges the fees when withdrawing it from the exchange are high sample on Binance the current fee for withdrawing BTC on Binance is around 0.001BTC in segwit network so that's too expensive.

So you don't have a choice but to hold it there or to exchange it to altcoin to be able to withdraw it with lesser fee.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but you're trying to move BTC from a centralized exchange to your cold storage, yes?

If so, some centralized exchanges simply have their withdrawal fees set too high unnecessarily; that, or you're balance is simply small. If that's the case, you're probably better off waiting for your BTC balance to increase a bit to make the withdrawal more worth it.

(and probably complain via customer support if they overcharge tx fees.)


I assume it's Crypto Dot Com.

The transaction fee at the moment is one of the best we have seen in recent times. If you have been around during the time that the mempool was congested due to the Ordinal attack, you would have been happy seeing the fee as lows as it is now. So, I wouldn't want you to continue waiting and hoping that the fee will come down because it is already down.

Since it is the first transaction to the wallet, I think it is better you send small amount to test if everything work smoothly before you send the rest BTC. This will save you the pain of realising you made a mistake in any of the stages. If you are using CEX to collect your Bitcoin, you can withdraw monthly or thereabout instead of regularly, this will help you reduce the fees.

Thank you to everyone who has responded so far.
You all have made interesting points.  Like mk4 pointed out, I think the problem is I have a small amount of BTC and the exchange rates are unreasonably high, so a fifty dollar fee stings a bit, just to move currency that I ALREADY PAID FOR ONCE.

Yes, Bitmaz, I meant Crypto dot com.  I cannot wait to get away from these infernal CEXes!
I really need to learn how to buy from a non-KYC source.

Slowly accumulating satoshis this year, does it mean you do multiple purchases, not only one?

It's good that you can spend money to buy a cold storage wallet but this is strange that you can not spend some money for transaction fee.

Cold storage wallet is good but if you can not have more money for it, you can use free wallet software, open source like Electrum wallet. You can set it up as single signature wallet or multi signature wallet, free.

Transaction fee now is cheaper than weeks or months ago and gives you good time for practice with on-chain transactions, pay fee.

If you have been accumulating bitcoin since start of 2024, you would have known about some worse times with more expensive transaction fee last 5 months.
https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#BTC,6m,weight

P2P is the best way if you want to avoid paying huge withdrawal fee especially when the amount you are trying to withdraw is small.

https://kycnot.me/ is place where you can find all the available options to convert fiat to crypto or vice versa and crypto to crypto without going through any KYC process. You may have to pay higher fee than the market fee depends on which fiat that you are using to buy crypto.

Yes, I buy small amounts of Satoshis every week when I get paid.
Usually between 10-30K Sats.
I can afford the fee, but I find it unreasonably high.  
For example, this week I only bought 10K Sats, which cost me around 70 USD$,
but the fee for my "test" transaction is 6K Sats....so the majority of what I bought will now be lost. 😞

If you can use OKX, you can convert the coin to coins like Algo and send it to OKX. Convert it back to bitcoin on OKX and withdraw. The transaction fee on OKX for bitcoin right now is less than $7 which is better than $50 on the exchange that you mentioned. What you see on exchanges are just a representation of your coins and not your coins, but the withdrawal fee for bitcoin on exchanges can be exorbitantly high.

If I can remember correctly, centralized exchanges usually have a fixed fee for their BTC transactions. So since you clearly have little coins to move, I'll suggest you keep accumulating till you have a reasonable amount of coins be for moving to your cold storage. Also, you can try registering on some other exchanges that requires less fees for BTC transactions. Then to move your coins over them, you might have to convert your Bitcoins to some other coins like usdt and move using less fee first before finally moving it to your cold wallet.

Yes they know all the techniques of people storing their money in cold storage that's why they have taken advantage of them and their fees have been raised up. They think that people are very much dependent on them that's why they have a mover advantage.

They're right to some extent and we can't do much about that. Let's hope for the market to get better so that we can pay them what they want easily.

You should follow Charles-Tim suggestion since it's the cheapest way to move your coins from the exchange to your cod wallet.
After doing that, you better buy bitcoin less frequently. So, instead of buying 20k sats every week, you can buy 40k bi-weekly.
This way you will reduce the number of UTXOs on your wallet and this will save you some fee when you need to spend your coins.
Also, don't forget to consolidate your inputs whenever the chance arises.

If your cold wallet accepts other cryptocurrencies the easiest way is to change your Bitcoins for a crypto with lower transaction fees. Unfortunately Bitcoin is pretty expensive for transactions fees, and I hope I'm wrong but it is very unlikely to change in the next few years IMO. So you are very likely to undergo the same issue each time with this cryptocurrency. Unfortunately it's not anymore a crypto designed for small transactions unfortunately, except in cases where LN is available, and you're able to use it, though.

I hope you bought 100K Sats for that price, not 10K.

Op transaction fee right now is very low and if you are having high transaction fee the you are using a new wallet that have not done anything before or you have done only few transactions. This have been happening to me for yes past and now the transaction fee in my wallet is okay. And this the present transaction fee.
https://www.talkimg.com/images/2024/05/25/LnphG.jpeg
With this amount of the transaction fee, you don't have to complain but if your transaction fee is higher than this then you have only done few transactions in the wallet.

Sorry, I didn't get this! How can the number of transactions he has made affect transaction fees? Did you mean he might have many unspent outputs? In that case, the more UTXOs (more received transactions) the higher the fees not the opposite.
Anyways, OP obviously is trying to withdraw his coins from a centralized exchange not from his own non-custodial wallet and that's why he is being charged with such high fees.

That sucks, what if you accumulate and save all of those money and buy like every week or whenever you have that bigger money? The fee fluctuates from $0.9 - $1+ nowadays and I think that won't makes sense if you're going to do a test transfer because for sure those accumulated sats of yours will be put into fees. It is just crazy that most of the centralized exchanges withdrawal fee are based still on BTC and not with $$ so the suggestion about converting it to other altcoins first makes sense and revert/convert it back to BTC.

I don’t think P2P can help here, OP is trying to move funds from a centralized exchange to his custodial wallet. If he does P2P on an exchange he might still need to pay transaction fee for the bitcoin to be moved to his wallet. The reason why OP seeks a decentralized exchange is because there transfer charges of withdrawal charges are usually small compared to the centralized exchanges. OP should simply use exchanges that charges lower and move his funds out of the exchange.


I don’t understand this better but I think you might have misunderstood the question here, OP is seeking a lower withdrawal charge exchange at the moment. Transaction fee on exchanges do not in anyway havd to do how many transactions you have made, they fix a withdrawal charges using some criterias and that’s all

This!
(thanks tho to everyone who left their thoughts and/or advice anyway, a lot of good points were made, and I now have a lot to consider moving forward.)

As far as UTXOs go, that's a paradigm I don't quite understand yet.
I thought I was doing a good thing by buying Sats whenever I got paid, but now some are telling me that is a bad thing.  This is worrisome.  
And 'Consolidating Inputs' ...I have no idea what that is.
I guess I truly am a newbie when it comes to BTC  *facepalm*

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Show me where to buy 100K Sats for 70usd, and I will go there right now.

Most exchanges. 1 Bitcoin just under 70k Usd. 100K Sats is 0.001 Bitcoin, just under 70 Usd. 10K Sats is worth less than 7 Usd.

There is no problem as you are accumulating it on exchanges. Some people are doing it and as the money reach higher amount, they withdraw to their noncustodial wallet.

If you are using a noncustodial wallet is what people are talking about. Let us say you send 0.001 BTC to your wallet, it will require you less amount of transaction fee when you want to transfer it to another person compared to if 0.0005 BTC is sent to your wallet two times. The more number of times you are sent bitcoin, the higher would be the fee if you want to spend all the UTXOs.

Do not be confused about what UTXOs are. If you are sent bitcoin just 1 time,  that is 1 UTXO. If you are sent bitcoin 2 times, you have 2 UTXOs. If you are sent bitcoin 3 times, you have 3 UTXOs and so on. But you can spend the UTXO one by one or combine some UTXOs to spend them. Go to Electrum testnet and be sending testnet coin to yourself to understand it better. As you are sending testnet coin to yourself, be checking coins which you can enable after you click on view.

You can read this LoyceV guide for it [May 2024] Fees are low, use this opportunity to Consolidate your small inputs (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2848987.msg29228128#msg29228128)

It is nothing hard to understand. As people are sending coin to your wallet, the UTXO (which is the number of time people sent you bitcoin) increases. When the fee on mempool (like https://mempool.space/) is very low, you can consolidate the inputs. Consolidating inputs means that you will send all the coins to another of your bitcoin address on the wallet. If you consolidate all the inputs for example by sending all the coins to only one address on your wallet, that means you have 1 UTXO because you have sent all the coins (that you received at different times) to only one address which makes it 1 UTXO.

If you are spending from 1 UTXO, the fee will be cheaper than spending from 2 or more UTXOs. You will not understand this totally if you do not see it practically on wallet like Electrum but I think you have understood the basic part of it.

Minimal order value on exchanges are likely $10 but you can check it with some websites. You need to check their minimal withdrawal and withdrawal fee too because at the end, after one or some purchases, you will have need to withdraw your bitcoin from exchanges to your own wallet.

You must know a minimum value of your bitcoins in the exchange account, and cost of withdrawal fee to avoid turning your money to dust after a withdrawal.

https://www.cryptowisser.com/exchanges/
https://exchangewar.info/
https://withdrawalfees.com/

Not necessarily a bad thing. Buying satoshis in small amounts and accumulating multiple transactions of small amounts only affects your transaction fee in the future if it is your own non-custodial wallet. But since you bought satoshis on a centralized exchange, it has no effect. The amount of the withdrawal fee in your case depends solely on the exchange and their internal policy. You can't influence that, except you can decide to exchange BTC for some altcoin that has a lower withdrawal fee.


Again, this is related to holding coins in a non-custodial wallet. "Consolidating Inputs" is basically combining multiple small transactions (UTXOs) into a single larger transaction. This can help you save on transaction fees in the future. Bitcoins are like bills and coins in your physical wallet. Imagine you have a wallet full of one dollar bills. Consolidating inputs is like exchanging a hundred one dollar bills for one $100 bill. Just as a $100 bill takes up less space in your wallet, so a Bitcoin transaction with a smaller number of inputs takes up less space on the network, and for that reason the fee for the transaction is lower.

I'm an idiot, you're right, too many zeros too count.
I had more than I thought....so there's that!
 ;D

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 Thank you...you are correct ✅

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 These are excellent points and make a lot of sense to me.  Thinking I'm getting the gist now.
Thank you for this valuable, non-judgmental input.  Everyone has been really terrific in this thread.
🤝👍🤝👍🤝👍

Which cold wallet you have bought, if you could just share the name here, many users of that wallet would share their experience with you. Plus I get the feeling you are getting right now, when I was a newbie and I have to transfer funds from the wallet to exchange I was damn worried, like what if my funds never show up on my exchange, I fear that what if a single letter or word is missed from my wallet address, this and that, I was totally imagining things. But with time, I don't care anymore.

Although it's not a good thing, we should care about things, especially when we are making tx, so, if you doubt it, then don't as I hope you must have bought a good cold wallet. Speaking of fees, I don't think they are going to be down, I don't know how much you are seeing, and from which wallet you are sending them, but fees can be a little high and a little down if you find the best time, then proceed and send the funds. BTW if you already have tested the cold wallet with a small amount then why asking here, or you stop there after seeing the fee.

I stopped the test transaction. 
Even though I can afford the fee, I'm going to wait until I have a bigger pile of Sats.

This is how the exchanges are discouraging people to withdraw on their site. Bitcoin transaction fee right now is less than $1.15 but the exchanges will charge too much. Hold the coin on an exchange is what you can do right now, but you can also make use of lightning wallet for the coins until it got to high amount like $200 to $500 and move it back to the exchange and send it to your cold wallet.