I agree with most that has been said, but still wanted to chip in/expand/combine some of the points that have already been made.

$1 is about 0.0001051 BTC at current exchange rate. In an "allmost" ideal situation, at this point you'll need to pay about 24 sat/vbyte as a fee, a one input 2 output tx will result in a fee of 0.00004224 BTC (about 40 cents). This means you'll pay about 40% on top of your $1 in order to have a decent chance of seeing your transaction end up in one of the next couple of blocks IF you use a decent wallet.
If you use an exchange wallet, you'll probably pay a lot more.

Your options are:

• Pay in advance: if you'll do repeated business with the seller AND you can trust him/her completely, pay him $50 in BTC for future products/services
• Use the lightning network: not 100% stable, but defenately good enough to have a channel funded with the equivalent of $50 (or a little less). Electrum supports the lightning network now, and there are several good mobile lightning wallets (i used eclair in the past, and it worked flawlessly)
• Switch to an altcoin... I usually use ETH or LTC when i need to pay near-dust amounts... Faster, commonly accepted but their network isn't backed by quite as much hashpower... But for a $1 transaction, who cares
• I would strongly discourage this, but you could also go for a 0-fee-between-customers custodial wallet. This should be your very last resort: not your keys, not your funds...

no, it's not stored in the blockchain...

Please read the rules:


This is a place where people come to discuss bitcoin, if there wasn't a firm rule against begging, our forum would be flooded with sob stories and it would become useless for those that actually want to discuss bitcoin.
I'm sorry this has happened to you, but this isn't the place to ask for money with a story that nobody is able to verify.

Sure it can be that high. Something could be wrong, but I seriously doubt it, like I said before: it's probably a wallet with lots of small inputs...

The optimal fee at this moment is 31 sat/byte.
A transaction from a native segwit wallet with 100 inputs and 2 outputs is about 21000 bytes
This results in an optimal fee of 0.0065 btc.

Like I tried to explain with the postage cost analogy: it's about the number of inputs and outputs, not about their value...
You can transfer a very low value and pay a huge fee, or a huge value with a low fee... Just don't collect dust amounts in your wallet

Since you said you tried to send the amount on the exact same time, i didn't go into the fluctuations of recommanded fees... But the fees are an incentive for a miner to include your transaction into the block they're trying to solve. Generally speaking: the more unconfirmed transactions, the higher the average fee (because people start to outbid each-other for a space in the next couple of blocks). Average fees can chance dramatically in the blink of an eye.

I'll try to make things a big simpler by giving this analogy... Mind you, the analogy doesn't quite match the technical aspects of the protocol, it is merely a "simple" visualisation trying to explain what's happening.

You have 2 vaults in 2 banks: one bank is called coinbase, the other is called electrum.

In your coinbase vault, you have 20 bills with a denomination of 500€.
In your electrum vault, you have 1.000.000 copper eurocents (0.01€).

Somebody asks you to send them 10.000 € by mail.

You go to your coinbase vault, take the 20 paper bills, put them in an enveloppe and pay 2€ for the enveloppe + stamp
You go to your electrum vault and you'll need 10 big boxes to fit the 1.000.000 copper coins. Each box costs you 100€ in stamps. In total you pay 1000€ to send the 10.000€

Now, you say electrum is no good, since it took you 1000€ to send 10.000€, while coinbase only costed 2€ to send 10.000€... What you don't realise is that it wasn't electrum's fault, the cost was so high because you collected 1.000.000 copper coins.

Same here: i'm 99% sure that electrum was used to collect very small unspent outputs. When you try to spend those unspent outputs, each unspent output will make the transaction bigger, and so it'll increase your fee.
On the other hand, coinbase will probably work with one unspent output, resulting in a very small transaction and a very small fee.

I've been around for a long time, electrum IS trusted. It IS one of the best wallets out there. If the fee is that high, there's a reason for it, and any other decentralised wallet would have resulted in a comparable high fee if it was funded in the same way electrum was.

But, if you really want to know: yes, the wallet you put in your link is trusted (AFAIK), but once again: using that wallet would also have resulted in a very high fee if it was funded with the same small valued unspent outputs.

There's a very small chance i'm wrong, but that chance is not very big to tell you the truth... I've been around long enough to recognize the common pitfalls new users usually get caught up in. Don't throw away a perfectly good desktop wallet because you didn't understand how fees work. Btw: properly generated paper wallets, airgapped wallets and hardware wallets are the most secure wallets out there. Don't hold a lot of funds on a desktop/mobile wallet!

Your fee is calculated in Satoshi per vbyte of transaction data. The bigger the transaction the higher the fee.

The size has nothing to do with the value, but depends on the number of inputs, outputs and type of wallet.

Next to this, some wallet might calculate the fee that's necessary to have a big chance of getting into the very next block while another wallet calculated a fee to have a decent chance of getting into one of the 10, 20, 30,... next blocks.

Last but not least, centralized wallets might cover part of the fee for you out of their own pocket, others might overcharge you (fee-wise) depending on how their income model is...

Bottom line: if you collected near-dust inputs (like faucet payment) in your electrum wallet, have a legacy wallet and indicated the transaction is high priority it's possible the fee is much higher than a native segwit wallet with only 1 input of a much higher value that's used to create a low priority transaction

Viabtc is not an alternative to services like bitaccelerate.

The first one is a mining pool, it can add accelerated transactions to the block they're currently trying to solve. And since they solve quite a few blocks each day, they'll get your transaction confirmed pretty fast (in case you either pay for the acceleration, or if you're lucky and you're one of the first 100 requests each hour)

The latter is just some script that rebroadcasts your transaction. It is only usefull if your original transaction is valid, unconfirmed and was broadcasted several days ago... The only thing it does is make sure a transaction that might have been dropped from the mempool of most mining nodes is rebroadcasted to them. It has little value.

The only thing i wanted to add to the discussion: joniboini is right: CPFP or RBF are far easyer and/or cheaper than paying for an accelerator service. If you have to use one, use one that is trusted and is offered by a large mining pool. You would not believe how many newbies got scammed by people that promise to "mine" their transaction using a home pc... Really, things like this actually happed in 2017.

So, you're basically asking mixers or coinjoin services to provide a way "honest" people can provide the mixer not to accept funds that were previously funding an address they believe to be used with malicious intent.

That's about the same as a country asking for a backdoor being built into cryptographic functions so the good guys can decrypt encrypted messages.

It's not enforceable, it will be abused, and what will be the requirements to prove you're an "honest" person?

In reality, mixers are run by anonimous entity's, I doubt they'll show any interest in not accepting certain funds...

Don't get me wrong, i'm not a fan of what those hackers did. They should be caught and punished severely... Just not by building backdoors into tools that are also used by honest people to regain some of their privacy.

hmm... If you re-read my posts, the only time i called it a bug was when i put the word bug between quotes... I called it a glitch, or a missing feature.
And that's what it was: a missing feature...
I do understand that, from the current workings of the wallet, this should be considered "normal". However, after somebody clicks the "max" button, i would expect the normal behavior to be that the wallet does remember the "max" button was clicked, and not to generate a change address... And that was exactly what i wanted to tell anybody who is actively involved in the development of electrum.

But, as it stands, i cannot replicate it anymore either... I have no idea what happened. Did it have something to do with the fact the average feerate was fluctuating quite heavily at that point in time, or something else? No idear, but i'm 100% certain above events did happen to me using 4.0.1 and 4.0.2, and i'm also sure i can no longer replicate these events.

I'll leave this topic open just in case somebody else is noticing the same behaviour in the future, and maybe some correlation between their case and mine can be found.

Nope,i did it wrong
In very old versions, you could enter the exclamation mark in the "value"-box, and that's what i tried...
It does, however, work in the "pay to"-box. It's a feature i very seldomly use, i had no idear the place where an "!" is accepted switched from the "amount"-box to the "pay to"-box.

I'll try to replicate the issue this evening, when i get back from work. But this case i'll use a better OS

Thanks for chipping in, but "deciding which address should get the remaining funds"? I have no idear where the gui would allow me to specify the exact change address... And even if it did allow this, i'd have to manually edit this value each time i wanted to clean out my wallet...

The exclamation mark results in following error:


I know a long time ago, this was the way of emptying out your wallet, but it seems to be invalid in version 4.0.2, or at least, it shows an error..



It's a wallet with imported private keys, the change funded the same address whose unspent outputs i was spending... Maybe that's the difference... Also, i didn't use the slider, but rather manually entered the fee.

EDIT: tried a "normal" wallet, couldn't replicate the issue there either... It was either a glitch, something i did wrong, or it only happens with wallets with manually imported private keys...
I actually noticed this "bug" on 4.0.1, then upgraded to 4.0.2 and saw the exact same behaviour... That's why i opened this topic.

I've searched a bit, but couldn't find this "missing feature" being described in an other topic (yet).

My environment:
Electrum 4.0.2 (downloaded from electrum.org, verified the sig)
Windows 10 (my employer forces me to use windows  )

Following settings:


Some background info: i try to empty out a wallet of mine... Completely empty it out (funds go to a safer hardware wallet).
So i want to use all unspent outputs funding addresses in my electrum wallet, create a transaction with a low fee (transfer between my own wallets, i do not need a confirmation that urgently) and the output of this transaction has to fund an address generated by my hardware wallet.

Step 1:

1) clicked the "send" tab
2) pasted the address generated by my hardware wallet
3) clicked on "max" (i want to empty out this wallet)
4) clicked on "pay"

Step 2:

That's nice and all... But i don't want to pay the 3.9 sat/byte fee that was proposed... I want to pay 1.1 sat/vbyte

step 3:

OOOOOPS... If i manually decrease the fee, a change address gets generated... That's not what i wanted... I clicked on "max", i want my wallet empty AND i don't want to overspend on fees... I don't want a change address...

Now, before i get all kinds of suggestions... They're not needed... I have plenty of workaround and technical knowledge to solve this one all by myself... I just wanted to notify ThomasV (or other dev's that are working on electrum) there was a usecase that isn't completely covered with the 4.0.2 UI

In case somebody wants the workarounds:

• downgrade to 3.3.8, this glitch did not exist, since the fee slider is placed earlyer in the tx creating process
• use the console
• export the private keys, use core or coinb.in to create the transaction

Defenately... If regtest suits your needs, i'd go with it... Regtest should cover ~90% of the usecases (just my gut feeling, not an actual study).
As for natsu_dev's request, i barely have enough tBTC to fund my faucet as it stands, so i can no longer part with them anymore.

I'd defenately choose satoshi's as a baseunit... Not any fiat currency, and probably not BTC directly (those comma's make it hard to work with... I'd rather have larger denominations instead of comma's).

Good luck, if you make a monopoly game (without the gambling aspect), i'd be interested in the beta phase

Looks really nice and fun... Shouldn't be toooo hard to create an online version either.
A quick google turned up a couple php/mysql monopoly scripts like this one: sourceforge.net/projects/gamedaemon/ (completely untested, not my script).

A lot of good idears for the "chance" and "community chest" cards pop to mind:

• You invested in a PONZI and lost 0.01 BTC
• Your coin forked, claim the fork and get 0.1 BTC
• You signed up on bitcointalk and purchased a copper membership, pay 0.001 BTC
• bitcoin . com tricked you into buying BCH, you lost 0.05 BTC in the process
• An airdrop happened, you claim 0.025 BTC
• You get caught for plagiarism and get banned, go directly to HODL

That being said, davis196 is right: be carefull not to get in a copyright infringement lawsuit from hasbro..

100% in agreement... If somebody needs testnet coins, it should be as simple as
=> editing bitcoin.conf on your testnet node (which you are running anyways, since you're developing a project for which you need tBTC)
=> running minerd for 1 hour
=> waiting untill your mined tBTC is mature
=> having enough tBTC for your project, donating the rest to a faucet when you're done

However, i've calculated that at this point in time there is > 100 Th running on the testnet (115 Th iirc, i did the calculations a couple days ago). No home cpu miner can ever compete with this... If this continues, a developer would actually need to buy an ASIC or rent hashrate to get enough tBTC to test his/her project, since nobody knows who's hoarding tBTC, and people with faucets (like me) also have a very hard time getting tBTC to give away for free.

A reset is direly needed... However, if it's just a reset without any other protocol changes, the miner (or miners) that's currently using relatively new ASIC's on the testnet will just continue mining with his ASICs on the "new" testnet, and not much will change... Offcourse, if the block reward is once again 50 tBTC, at least a developer can rent hashrate for a short amount of time, since he'd only have to solve one or two blocks to get enough tBTC for about any project he fancies (at the moment, you'd have to solve a whopping 500 blocks to have ~100 tBTC).

To be honest, i don't have a clear-cut answer for this conundrum either.... Just as a brainstorm exercise i was thinking about a reset of the testnet and a huge premine done by the dev's on this newtestnet. The devs can then either run an honest high-claim tBTC faucet themselves, or fund the 6 or 7 existing faucets (maybe even make an agreement with the faucet owners first, about minimum claim amounts, no popups, minimal advertisement,...). An other option would be to look at the altcoin community and borrow some of their idears (like making the testnet POW/POS, or making resets very common so nobody wants to burn electricity to mine tBTC that'll only be valid for a couple of days/weeks).

At this moment, coinbase rewards seems to end up funding addresses like this one:
live.blockcypher.com/btc-testnet/address/2N3oefVeg6stiTb5Kh3ozCSkaqmx91FDbsm/

Once in a while, other addresses pop up tough... But not very often.

I personally use wasabi as a hotwallet... From wasabi I either coinjoin or use chipmixer, then my funds go to my hardware wallet.

Wasabi is great, it has a visual way of showing me which funds have been coinjoined and which are still linkable to my identity... It also has good coin controll features and works over the internally started tor router... To bad the coinjoin feature doesn't work when you use wasabi in combination with your hardware wallet... That would have been an ideal situation.

If the ability to connect using tor classifies a wallet as privacy-centric according to your defenition, you should add electrum to your list since it supports connections over the tor router out of the box (click on the green button in the bottom right corner, go to the proxy tab). A lot of other wallets (like core) can also connect trough other nodes over the tor router.

Bitpay isn't well-liked in this community...

You can read the reasons in sites like this one: https://debitpay.directory/anti-bitcoin/ (not my site)

Instead of bitpay, why not use btcpayserver, or run a core or electrum daemon and use the json-rpc interface directly

You can import the same seed in as many wallets as you want... Your wallet in itself does not contain any bitcoin(s) anyways, it only contains the master private key from which other private keys can be derived (and maybe some metadata like labels). Derived keys can be used to sign transactions spending your funds.

For example, if you have a wallet managing 1 private key, and the address belonging to this private key has one unspent output with a value of 1 BTC, you can import the seed for this wallet into 50 other wallets. Each wallet will show a spendable balance of 1 BTC.
If you spend this unspent output of 1 BTC in any of those 51 wallets, the balance of each wallet created by importing the same seed will be 0.

Offcourse, issues can occur if you mess up the exporting or importing of your seed.... Or if the wallet you use to import the seed also has technical issues.