Bitcoin Forum

Did not expect that I will create a topic here, but here is my story and I'm asking for an advice.

I'm trying to withdraw some funds from BitGo online wallet. Transfer fee is just killing me. When I try to withdraw around 0.15 BTC, wallet wrote that I have available around 0.12 BTC only. This withdrawal fee seems very high imho. The only option I have is to set "Transaction Priority" (from "High priority (Est. 2 blocks)" to "Custom fee in Satoshi per byte"). Changing transaction priority does not affect the amount available.

Do I understand it right - I do not have any option to get my 0.15 BTC, instead of 0.12 BTC and I all I have is to take this as a lesson?

What happens if you set the custom fee to 1 sat/byte? My guess is you've received many small transactions, and spending all at once leads to a large transaction size, and thus a large fee.
If that's the case, and you're not in a hurry, you should set a low fee per byte. You're going to want to read Consolidate your small inputs! (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2848987.0). Fees are currently not very low, so take your time.

I've never used "BitGo wallet", I'm just guessing based on similar experiences.

Yes, I receive lots of small transactions (weekly signature rewards) and try to withdraw the whole amount at once.

Setting custom fee of "1 sat/byte" does not change my amount available. I dont know what this is even for.
https://i.imgur.com/TK6vhNw.png
https://i.imgur.com/sCqXlW5.png

As I understood, the more I receive in my account, the more BitGo charge me for fee. But this does not look like what is written in their Pricing (https://www.bitgo.com/pricing)

Right now, I'm not in a hurry, I can send everything by parts. I'm just disagree with amount available...

From 2 images you uploaded. I see the first image, you do correctly by set your transaction fee at 1 satoshi / byte. It means you don't care about estimated priority of your transaction if you click on send at the fee.

But in the second image, you choose high priority with the estimated waiting blocks to get first confirmation is 2 blocks. That surely will charge you high fees.

However, in both images, I don't see the fees you will be charge if you move it at 1 satoshi/byte or with the high priority option (how much high the fee is at satoshi/ byte). I don't see such info in 2 images.

I the second image, I guess the fees will be different from time to time to meet high priority and get first confirmation after 2 blocks. Sure fee will be terribly high because you are in fee rush.

I'm guessing you chose their hot wallet known as "BitGo Pay As You Go wallet" which charges 0.25% transaction fee for bitcoin withdrawals. Still, that's way less than the BTC.03  being "eaten" by the wallet. Does the wallet require you to have a minimum balance like what bank accounts do? I know it's a crazy idea but it's strange that your total balance is almost BTC0.15 but what's being shown as available is BTC0.12

These are the only options and fields available. In both images it is shows, that whatever I choose, my available amount to be send does not change. And there is no line that shows real fee.

I've asked same question on reddit and the first answer was "Not your keys, not your wallet. BitGo may charge you what ever they want"... This was my first bitcoin wallet created years ago and I did not expect situation to be in this way.

With such an attitude from BitGo I would love to move all my funds and even wait for weeks for them to be transferred.

0.25% is small fee, assume we agree it is a small fee but even if it is only small fee for enough big transactions. For small transactions, sometimes fee are nearly equal to initial values of bitcoins used to make that transaction.

Therefore, consolidate bulk of small transactions when fee is low (perfect to consolidate them at 1 satoshi/ byte), then choose another good period to move consolidated fund (at low fee, but can be higher than 1 satoshi/byte). In my favorite, I don't want to be charged double fee (even it is 0.25% per withdrawal) from any wallet. With non-custodial wallets such as Electrum I don't have to pay double fee.

I don't use BitGo wallet but if your disclosure is true, it is time to use another wallet (should be non-custodial).

Not the answer you wanted but it's true though. I was wondering why it took you so long to ditch it and go for non-custodial wallets.

Contact them by email then and wait for their (slow) response. Given that many of us here have little idea about the wallet, it's your best/only option I guess. Please post an update if they ever explain things to you.

Regardless, 0.25% is only BTC0.0003725, not almost BTC0.03 which was the amount deducted to the total balance if OP would withdraw the maximum.


I guess OP here has to ask the support and clarify this issue before proceeding to withdrawal, or maybe he can try to withdraw 25% of the total balance and see how much fee was charge.

Just wrote them a ticket, that it is impossible that sending $1,600 would cost me around $300. Their "pay-as-you-go" pricing 0.25% looks more like ~19% to me.

Dont want to "play" with money testing transaction fees, when sending 1/4 of total balance or any other amount. I'm waiting for their answer. It might be that they charge their own fee plus network fee, but $300 is simply a robbery.

Why I do not understand, that why changing transaction priority does not change anything.


I was just accumulating funds there. There was no need to send them until now :)

I tried to access their page to see if they have any hidden fees (written in very small letters), but I only get this:


But if one does a little searching about high fees and their service, then similar problems can be found as in this case. In this case, the user paid as much as  37.2% of the total value of the transaction (https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/4x7zez/bitgo_just_charged_me_327_of_trx_value_in_network/), which means that BitGo definitely charges very high fees in some cases.

bakasabo, based on number of your inputs (can you check your total number of transaction), you can at least approximately calculate the size of your transaction so if nothing else determine if there is a real reason for such a large fee (blockchain fee for high priority) or BitGo charges some internal fee.

This is what it would look like if you used a Legacy address and had 145 transactions - and you want confirmation in the next 2 blocks.

https://i.imgur.com/aVc6I2z.jpg
https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/fee-calculator/

Two suggestions OP.

First of all, try filling in the rest of the fields (specifically the address field) and seeing if the "available" box changes. I've seen some wallets in the past which won't update fees properly until you put in an address, since different output addresses can result in different transaction sizes.

Second, check that all incoming transactions are confirmed. The mempool is pretty backed up at the moment, so perhaps you have a transaction or two which are still unconfirmed and not available to be spent, which would explain the discrepancy.

Have you used BitGo to send a transaction before, or did you only receive funds? It might be you've reached the maximum transaction size (in bytes). If that's the case, your wallet won't be empty after sending the maximum amount.

You can try to send a smaller amount (say 0.01 BTC), set 1 sat/byte fee, and see what happens to your total balance, the real transaction, and the amount Available. A 1 sat/byte transaction will take a long time to confirm, but that's not your main concern now.

Update:


The number of transactions I've received is 79. They all are around 0.001-0.003 btc and were received during a year.


All the transactions are confirmer, last one was about a week ago. I've tried filling all the fields, nothing changes. Dont know what should I type in "Internal Transaction Memo"; receive address (tried with coinbase) does not provide anything for this field. "Funny" thing is, as Bitcoin price grows, my Available funds are not "Available: 0.11742646 BTC"


I lied a bit about not sending funds before, I've checked history and found out that I've already used BitGo online wallet for sending. In November 2018 it cost me 0.00005099 BTC (7.702 sat/B - 1.926 sat/WU - 662 bytes) for sending 0.03039901 BTC

Now the answer from the support:

"The reason that your spendable balance is lower than the total balance of your wallets is because the spendable balance is the sum of the 200 most valuable unspents in your wallet. That being said, if you wish to increase the spendable balance of your wallet, you will need to consolidate the unspents in your wallet using our API.

For the matter of transaction fees, there are two fees that you are paying, one to BitGo of 0.25% of the total transaction value and the other is the network fee determined by the weight of the transaction in vbytes * the feeRate applied. The fee rate applied to the transaction is based on the priority level that you select for confirmation. Also, the more unspents used as inputs in the transaction (200 in this instance) the more the transaction weighs in vbytes. "

As I havent experienced "consolidating unspents using API" I've asked in my next email how to do that and asked for a step-by-step guide and got an answer:

"I reviewed your account and that spendable balance seems correct. Your spendable balance needs to account for the fees to the network as well as the BitGo withdrawal fees so it should be a little less than your available balance. Your wallet has less than 200 unspents so you should not need to consolidate like previously mentioned."

Really dont know what to do. During last few hours my amount available becomes $360 less than it is on my address...

I guess that's because fees are going up (https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#0,24h). Ask support why your Available balance doesn't increase when you manually set 1 sat/byte. It looks like that feature isn't working.
For now, don't rush things. I'd say try again when fees are much lower. Usually, fees are lowest on Sundays, but it varies from week to week.

While waiting, find yourself a real wallet. The one you're using now sounds like it's multisig, so you're totally at the mercy of a third party. That's not what Bitcoin is about. The best choice of wallet depends a bit on what system you're using, but Electrum is probably a good choice. Don't fall for phishing sites. You may want to setup a cold wallet, but there too: it's important to read up on potential pitfalls so you don't have to experience them.

Currently recommended fee climb up to 65 sat/byte which is the reason for fee is getting increasing.

It seems 2017 year scenario just repeating again so don't be in a hurry and you can move your funds when the memepool get cleared and I will say don't set 1sat/byte transaction it might gets stuck forever so wait for the number of unconfimered transaction gets lower.

79 multi-sig inputs certainly goes some way to explaining why they are trying to charge such high transaction fees. You are probably looking at a transaction of over 20 kB. As LoyceV says though, you should still see a significant reduction when you select 1 sat/vbyte. I would email them and tell them as much. If they were genuinely charging you 1 sat/vbyte while taking 0.028 BTC from your total, then they are claiming that your transaction size is 2.8 megabytes(!), which is clearly nonsense.

Using your own wallet not only gives you real control over your coins and real control over the fees, but it also isn't multi-sig (so your transactions would be smaller and therefore cheaper), and gives you the option of using SegWit (which again would make your transactions cheaper). For future reference, if you can receive fewer larger payments, rather than many smaller payments, that would also help when it comes to paying lower fees.

Another update:

Yesterday I've asked them to explain their calculation of available amount and how they calculate fees. The answer was the following:

"Network fees will vary and I cannot provide you with what it currently is.  You can refer to https://core.jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#0,4d to see what the trend has been for fee rates. You can alternatively set a lower fee rate if you'd like, but please keep in mind it will take longer to confirm as you will need to wait for fees to drop to that rate."

Also LoyceV was almost correct with:


Their answer was:

"Our page will not update if you make any changes to the fee priority, but by default our system is showing it as if you were setting it at a two block confirmation priority, which is considered the 'high priority'."

I find their way of work and presenting information - misleading.

I have 0.15 BTC, with high priority transaction system says I can send only 0.12 BTC. Switching to less quick transaction amount available does not change, but in fact, I can send more. I've filled all the necessary and put 0.145 BTC with "Very Low Priority (Est. 300 blocks)" option and clicked Send. Next screen was:

https://i.imgur.com/SKXQpQT.png

As everyone can see, the button "Send Funds" is blue, which means I can send more than BitGo said I have available.

I think this "bug" or misleading information was made on purpose. Users either send everything extra expensive, or leave funds in their wallet.
I've seen many times on this forum BitGo among the list of recommended online wallets. I've been using BitGo to receive funds for more than than a year, but when the time comes to sending, I was not expected to have such issues with reputed wallet.

The problem with "reputable" web wallets, is that web wallets are used almost exclusively by people who do not know why web wallets are a terrible choice to store your bitcoin from both a security and a privacy point of view, only want to use the wallets for basic functions, don't understand about setting your own fees, and so on. The "recommendations" you get for which ones to use are therefore going to be unreliable at best. There are plenty of users on here which recommend web wallets based solely on the fact "I use them and they haven't scammed me", which is a terrible metric to use.

Do yourself a favor and withdraw your money to your own desktop wallet. It's more secure, more private, cheaper, and means you aren't placing complete trust in an anonymous third party.

Glad you managed to withdraw your coins without having to pay their ridiculous fee though. As you say, their website is misleading and their support were less than helpful.

I havent withdrawn anything yet, but I'm planning to do it in a very nearest future. So far I have downloaded latest version of Electrum wallet and I'm going to read as much as possible about it and options it provide. I know/imagine how it works, but I'm not in a rush to set it and immediately send funds there. I've already have a bad experience of "I'll just google how to create a bitcoin wallet, and use easiest way to do it".

P.S. I will keep updating this topic with info how much I've managed to withdraw, how much it cost me, compared to what BitGo said I can withdraw. I think it would be a nice and free experience for others.

Make sure you also verify your download.

https://bitcoinelectrum.com/how-to-verify-your-electrum-download/
https://bitzuma.com/posts/how-to-verify-an-electrum-download-on-windows/
https://bitzuma.com/posts/how-to-verify-an-electrum-download-on-mac/

Recently I did paid nearly $20 as fee for a $250 transaction from my electrum.So downloading electrum may not change the things much because the transaction fee depends on the size of your transaction so if you are going to send all the funds from your wallet which you had received from 100 small transactions the fee is going to be same but at least you can set whatever fee you want if you can wait for your transaction get confirmed.

That's a terrible design choice!

I expect a Bitcoin wallet to be absolutely accurate when it comes to balance, transaction, funds and fees. This is plain stupid.

At least they give a preview before sending.

I would only recommend online wallets for very specific purposes, such as very small amounts that you don't mind losing, for instance to make small payments when you're away from your own trusted computer.

I wouldn't call it "reputed" ;) Most wallets have a "Max" button that actually sends the maximum, and empties your wallet. Now you have to manually figure it out, based on your screenshots you may be able to withdraw something around 0.1485 BTC, then wait until it confirms. As long as they keep broadcasting the transaction it should arrive, even if it takes a few weeks.

You can have fee-problems with other wallets too when you have 79 inputs, so it's good practice to consolidate (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2848987.0) your inputs once in a while. Depending on the purpose of each wallet, I do this for anything between just 2 up to tens of inputs.

Given the total network fee you would pay to withdraw 0.145 BTC you can help yourself with ViaBTC Transaction Accelerator (https://www.viabtc.com/tools/txaccelerator) and you certainly won’t wait 300 blocks for the first confirmation. The only thing that matters is that you speed up your transaction to the full hour - so paste your transaction ID an click send on full hour (you will also need to solve the captcha).

Regarding Electrum, if you download from official site and verify signature of file + your PC is virus/malware free you are relatively safe. Just keep your seed offline and check every address which you will use to protect yourself from clipboard malware.

I've seen that claim before, but it's incorrect. The total fee doesn't matter, ViaBTC ignores anything with less than 10 sat/byte fee:

If it says so then it's probably true, but the OP can definitely try if it decides to try the Very Low Priority option - and given the current situation with 1-2 sat/byte it can take some time before miners get his transaction.

I think that in this way they are trying to forever bind their users to their service. When you have some amount left in your account, sooner or later you will try to use this application again in order to get your money back. And so every time you will return to them in the hope that something will change. I consider this to be a kind of fraud. It may be worth contacting lawyers, it may be possible to file a class action lawsuit against BitGo and try to force them to pay compensation to the wallet owners.

A good topic on Electrum and verify this wallet
How to Safely Download and Verify Electrum (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5240594.msg54223763#msg54223763)

People who use Electrum the first time will do like it because it is simple to use. To get more safety, people have to verify wallet before using it. Verifying wallet first time is annoying and looks complicated for everyone, but beware of fake apps and those steps will be done more easily if you do it second, third and later times.

Continue of my epic usage of BitGo online wallet.

On Friday I've decided to make a test and send 0.05 BTC to an exchange. I've closed eyes on a transaction fee option that BitGo automatically offered and set 7sat/byte by myself.

https://i.imgur.com/H4ddK3z.png

With the current situation, I found that presented fee suits me and clicked "Send Funds". The exchange notified me in 2 hours that they see my funds, but they need "3 block confirmation" to add funds to my balance. The transaction was in status unconfirmed till Sunday. And everything in my story might seems brilliant, if not only one thing.

The transaction on blockchain looked like this:

First line is BitGo fee, Third line is the amount sent, but second line 0.01074352 does not look like Network fee 0,00056875 at all.
Plus my balance on BitGo is:

https://i.imgur.com/LOy85ZF.png

But according to blockchain it is:
https://i.imgur.com/KpoVte2.png

I'm not proud and I'm not afraid to ask and to learn. So I asked the support about that second line. The answer was:

"The outputs on the transaction are to your recipients. One address is the one you entered to send the funds to, the other is your change address (leftover change sent back to your wallet), and the other is for your BitGo fees."

Change address... Ok, that was something new to me, because with previous transactions, I did not face "change addresses". The only thing I can do right now is to wait.

To be continued...

This is completely normal in Bitcoin :)
Note that the wallet uses more small inputs than needed for your payment, resulting in a larger transaction (in bytes, and thus in fees) than needed. So your wallet consolidated (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2848987.0) some of your small inputs already. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it would be a waste to do that when fees are high.

Just so you know: partially hiding addresses and txid doesn't stop anyone from finding the complete address (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5254914.0) and transaction. So it's kinda useless for privacy.

Blockchain.com explorer shows the balance of one address, your wallet can hold many different addresses.

Thank you for all your answers in this topic. So I should not worry about "this 0.01074352 to change address" and I should just relax and what for funds to return ? How long does it usually takes for funds to return?

Sadly that during more than 2 years in crypto, I paid so little attention to bitcoin transactions... Everything on ethereum seems more easy. But no doubt, finding out all this "new" is interesting.

Correct.

No need to wait, the change address is already in your wallet:

I have the opposite experience :)

The funds won't "return" because there is no need for them to.

Your BitGo wallet contains potentially thousands of different addresses. The balance it displays is the sum of all the bitcoin stored at all these addresses. Up until now, you have only ever used a single address, which we will call Address A, and all your other addresses have been empty. Therefore, when you looked up Address A on a block explorer, the total value of bitcoin on Address A was the same as on your BitGo wallet.

Now that you have made a transaction, your change has been sent back to the next address in your BitGo wallet, which we will call Address B. This is normal for bitcoin, as it helps with privacy and security to not reuse addresses. Because Address B is also part of your BitGo wallet (the same as Address A), the funds are still displayed as normal, and you can spend from it just as you could before. If you look up Address B on a block explorer, you will see it contains a small amount of bitcoin, but if you add the values of Address A and Address B together, then it will equal your BitGo balance.

The funds on Address B will stay there until you spend them.

Change address is part of your wallet (in this case BitGo) and funds that go to change address should be visible on your overall balance at the moment you click send button. That coins never even left your wallet, but as LoyceV says they are only the result of the distribution of your funds between all the inputs you have created over time (incoming transactions) and the outgoing transaction in which you sent 0.05 BTC.

Since it was not possible to send exactly 0.05 BTC, part of the coins had to be returned to your change address - just like when you have to pay $7 and you have a $10 bill - you get the rest of $3 back.

Thanks for posting this. I was searching around Google for a solution to this 'insanely high BitGo fees' problem and your posts really helped me. Even I'm considering moving almost all of my web wallet funds (a big chunk of which is on BitGo's 'pay as you go') to a h/w wallet.

Since bitgo is online wallet like you claimed you have to abide with whatever fee they ask for, this is a major problem from Centralized wallets and platforms in crypto space, if this bitgo wallet have a recovery seed you could just import into another crypto wallet and adjust the transaction fee yourself

People need to stop using web wallets, online wallets and centralized wallet, if anything happens to the wallet platform it will affect every users, coinbase for example whenever something happen to their server no one will be able to make transactions on the wallet, this is bad idea for those who don't know, you can't adjust the gas fee yourself either

The worst of all is if the wallet developers stop development on the project there is no way to go away with your coins because such wallets don't release private keys and Mnemonic seed to their users, it means that any assets you store on such wallet isn't totally yours to control

Some time has passed and I have experienced one more weird thing that BitGo wallet makes. That is another warning to those who is using BitGo wallet.

Maybe this is all due to me being inexperienced enough, but I cant understand and find it weird and unfair, that while doing a transaction from wallet A to wallet B, BitGo add to transaction something extra. Here (https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/transactions/btc/acf9856b2e7bbea577e9f4a408fb90d4431cbd0ce1aedb516d2cd21b319859f3) is an example of TXID. I was sending 0.0031 BTC but into that transaction BitGo has added 0.011 BTC. With 1 sat/byte 0.0031 would be transferred much faster than 0.0141 imo. So a warning for those who wants to use low fee and expect speed - dont use low fee, as you might wait days or weeks for confirmation.

Not to mention that you can send all of your balance. After hitting "max" button, you still have something left on a balance. If you have 0.01 BTC, you can write manually 0.009 in amount windon and use 0.0001 for a fee.

I don't think this needs a warning. I can see why they did this, and (depending on circumstances), it makes sense.

It looks like this wallet avoids creating small inputs. If you would have used only 0.00335 BTC to send 0.0031 BTC, you would have ended up with an input smaller than 0.00025 BTC. By adding another input, you end up with one larger input instead of a small and a large one. When fees are low, that's actually a good thing to do. And considering the fee was 1.012 sat/vbyte, it's a cheap consolidation and your next transaction pays a lower fee.
If you don't want this (for instance for privacy reasons), you should use manual coin control. I don't know if "BitGo" supports that.

Unlikely. Miners pick the transactions with the highest relative fee (per vbyte) first, and the total transaction size doesn't really matter.

Again: it depends. If you're not in a rush, a low fee is fine. Check Johoe's site (https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#BTC,24h,weight) for instance to see what you can expect.
If you're in a hurry, you should indeed pay a high enough fee per vbyte.

It sounds like you should just switch to Electrum, where the "Max" button works as expected.

Can you please comment on following ?

https://blockstream.info/tx/4ceee694673ccb09017fc879f18d90bdd543f911859441e635de5e56c0c82a04 - this transaction I have made previous Monday. Until today it hasnt been confirmed and BitGo offered me to accelerate it for ~$6 (cant remember BTC value they have asked).

https://blockstream.info/tx/1b69e0d0006b705ce07e0c050122d52729baf148bc99365147a825229db7d81b  - this is the transaction Ive made today. It was confirmed today and almost at the same time it has triggered last week transaction to be confirmed.

BitGo wanted to charge me $6 for a transaction that they were going to confirm anyway together with second transaction?

It currently has 18 confirmations. But why didn't you use CPFP?
Blockchair (https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/transaction/4ceee694673ccb09017fc879f18d90bdd543f911859441e635de5e56c0c82a04) shows they use 2/3 multisig. That makes the transaction larger than necessary. Since you're dealing with small inputs, that's a waste of fees.

Your second transaction basically did a CPFP: Child Pays For Parent. Meaning: your second transaction paid enough fees for a miner to include both transactions in a block.

I've never used BitGo and I don't know how it works, but you make it sound as if it's a custodial wallet. They're not miners, so all they could do is CPFP to get your transaction confirmed. And it looks like they want to earn $6 from that.

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Why are you using "BitGo"?

I have already answered that to you two years ago :) Because BitGo was among recommended wallets, it was an online wallet, it was easy to create a wallet, I needed a wallet here and now, and dont have time to read, search and test other, plus was not allowed to download and install anything on work PC. So an online wallet was my solution. I had been using it for year because... I simply got used to it. But with time, I have noticed that it has started working different, not as usually. Usually, Ive made transactions with more or less same $ value and 1 sat/byte fee and they got confirmed with several hours, with years several hours have changed to half a day, day, week.

Lol. I didn't read back the entire topic indeed. Let me rephrase that: why are you still using BitGo? ;)

Bitcoin fees went up a lot in the past month, partially caused by large spam transactions.

For what it's worth: I would never use "recommended" and "web wallet" together ;)

Then I will rephrase words "used to" and "habit" with: I am a reckless and lazy cryptocurrency user, that will lose funds one day because "that will never happen to me" or "it works until it is broken" scenarios. I am lazy to create a new address in Electrum and write Hhampuz to change my signature reward address...

Makes sense :)

If you ever want to improve: get a hardware wallet, and set it up with Electrum. It combines security with flexibility. I'll probably tell you the same again a few years from now ;)