Bitcoin Forum

Hello,

I'll move balance from one non-HD wallet to one new HD wallet that I've created recently. The old one is not encrypted, the new one it is.

Is there any risk if I move all the balance in one transaction to 1 destination address?
Or it's recommended to split the balance in 4 or 5 transactions to different destination addresses in the target wallet?

(Transaction fee is a very high at the moment, so if multiple transactions are recommended, then I'll wait more time before doing this).

Thanks!

I'd say that it would be better to merge everything into 1 output, instead of 5 smaller ones. Reason is that you will pay alot of fees anyway, even more when you keep splitting it up.

Say you divide it over 5 adresses, if you want to spent from those 5 again, you will need to make another big input transaction, while you could also merge everything into 1 tx right now, and only have 1 input the next time you're going to spent anything.

And no, there shouldn't be really any "risk" into submerging all your bitcoin in one transaction, to one adress.

Thanks for the answer, I'll do it just in two then.
Just in case i stupidly do something wrong....

Is good to know that there's no extra risk in having everything in 1 receiving address, vs different receiving address (in the new wallet).

My idea is to move to this new wallet encrypted and stick with this one from now. And keep the old wallet as a history wallet.

When you say from non HD wallet to HD wallet, do you mean both within bitcoin core? can you tell me the difference between hd and non hd wallet?

The risk is your privacy. If you own a total of 0.1BTC, I wouldn't worry about it, and add it all together into 1 address, to safe on fees in the future.
But if you're holding a large amount of money, you should keep different addresses and smaller portions to pay for stuff. You don't want your local coffee shop owner to know you hold $100M in Bitcoins.

To safe on fees now: if you're not in a hurry you can set quite a low fee, and just wait for it to confirm someday. Or check this fee estimator (https://btc.com/stats/unconfirmed-tx) and make the transaction when it says 40 sat/byte again (probably on a quiet Sunday).

If you want to keep your privacy intact, you need to enable "Coin Control" in your Bitcoin Core wallet (it's in "display" options, enable "Coin Control features" (tick the box) then on send you will see "inputs", click there and then you can choose how you exactly are making transactions.

Send the coins in a proper way that it doesn't jeopardize your privacy.

For example if you are receiving donations in address A which is a public address, and you have a business that has address B which is also public, you don't wan to send A+B in a row because people would know you are taking donations somewhere. This is an annoying aspect of Bitcoin, you must have control of these things, I wish I could simply "click send" and be done with it, but it is what it is.

If you don't care about that, just send it all in a row in a single transaction.


Well, if you have $100M in a single address and you wanted to pay for something without directly sending from such an huge address, I guess you can create a new receiving address, send a decent amount like $1000 bucks to yourself on there, and use that address from now on to pay for stuff, this way they couldn't prove you own $100M, just $1000.