Brilliant, thanks! I really like how deep this link goes, but I need to study it further to understand it. Gonna need some time.

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What do you mean "plus or minus input" ?

For 1 input and 2 outputs for segwit 0, the result should be 1*68 + 2*31 + 10 = 140 vB. Am I wrong?

I appreciate that you also provided me with a formula to calculate fees, even if it seems trivial! Cheers!

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Thanks mate. Very helpful information.

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So, having seen all that, I assume:

1. It is always better (but of course rarely possible) to spend a whole UTXO, since it is the only way to have 1 and not 2+ outputs. Correct?
2. The amount of sats doesn't count at all, as it is always represented by 8 bytes of information in the output. Correct? I kinda knew that bit already, but I ask for clarification.

Finally,

Can you give 2-3 tips to follow if I wanted to create better transactions in terms of weight? Take for granted that I use coin-control by default, so I always choose the UTXOs I spend. What I want is a way to treat them more wisely.

Problem: I have really been struggling with understanding how the transaction size is calculated.

Question: I will post my thoughts below. I will ask my questions with red color.

The best answer: Every answer is much appreciated. However, I would be very happy if one could also point an example, either from a real transaction or not.

A bitcoin transaction takes N inputs and produces X outputs.

The transaction includes the following parts:

Version	4 bytes
# of Inputs	(How many bytes is this ?)
Inputs	Each input's size (*)
# of Outputs	(How many bytes is this ?)
Outputs	Each output's size (**)
Locktime	4 Bytes

* Each input consists of the following fields:

TXID	32 bytes
VOUT	4 bytes
ScriptSig Size	(How many bytes is this ?)
ScriptSig	(How many bytes is this ?)
Sequence	4 Bytes

** Each output consists of the following fields:

Value	8 bytes
ScriptPubKey Size	(How many bytes is this ?)
ScriptPubKey	(How many bytes is this ?)

Sounds like a good choice for a country to have open mind.


Ok, but I see Bitcoin as a new payments standard and not as an investment. Of course I appreciate the market going up, but I hope to see Bitcoin becoming a huge payments network.

That's a great thing about Bitoin. Isn't it? It can be used both as an investment and a payment method. I mean with FIAT you can pay, but because of inflation you can't just hold and wait for it to appreciate, since it will drop in value as time passes.

Thanks for the info. Looks like Bitcoin wins in all categories (fees, limits etc).

Isn't it too expensive? Also, since I don't know the application, is it a flat fee or a percentage of the total transacted value?

Can it? This is my point... I am afraid not many people use it.

Absolutely, but people in countries where salaries are higher tend to:
1. use banks a lot.
2. don't really care about the remittance cost because it doesn't look so scary.
3. don't pay such high remittance costs because these countries have bank arrangements that offer more reasonable fees. This sucks because it feels like the richer pay less in fees when transacting together.


That's disappointing mate. I hope you can cope with remittance costs easily enough. This "our folks and friends who are outside the country in a developed, do not mind the fees" felt like a punch to the stomach to me... It is actually the points (2 & 3) that I mention in my answer to un_rank above.


To be honest, I didn't consider exchanging the Bitcoin to the local currency after receiving it. You are right... I wish we could use Bitcoin without needing to convert it back to local currencies.

Super important note, thanks for mentioning that.

According to this, Argentina (for example) faced 98% inflation in 2022.

Imagine going to the store and suddenly, in a year, every price has doubled...


Easier and faster, yes! This is also true. I wonder though, how much time it takes to send a traditional remittance from a country to another. I have never sent one, so...

I am curious to know if (and how much) Bitcoin is adopted in low- and middle-income countries.

I am reading the Bitcoin Magazine (Issue 24 - The El Salvador Issue).

Here are some stats, according to the magazine:

• The global average cost of sending $200 remained high at 6.5% - or $13, in 2020.
• In Sub-Saharan Africa, the average cost of sending $200 was 8.2% in 2020.
• Sending money from Japan to Brazil cost 11.5% in remittance costs in 2020
• 1 out of 9 people on the planet depend on remittances sent by migrant workers to support their families.

According to these, do you feel like Bitcoin has helped? Do you use it to avoid all those remittance costs?

Of course LN is the solution but provided you have opened the channels already. If not, you will have to pay the opening fee which is on-chain and as such, you will have to pay high fees.

In 2021, a friend of mine was trying to convince me to open LN channels now and not in the upcoming years, because who know how high the fees would be. But in 2021, I didn't know a lot about LN, so... Unfortunately I have only a few open channels now.

Answer to o_e_l_e_o for the question above:

It didn't work. For some reason I am unable to create the whirlpool accounts for an airgapped wallet. I could only add accounts 1 - 9. I scrolled down but there is no "whirlpool accounts" option, whereas for a hot wallet the option was there.

So I did something else. I created a hot wallet in Samourai with the Whirlpool Accounts enabled. I sent some sats and it made some coinjoins. So, I had 3 UTXOs in my Postmix account with some mixing rounds each (3, 5, 6 respectively).

Then I created a hot wallet in Sparrow with the same seed phrase. Indeed there were 3 UTXOs in Postmix, so I pressed "Start Mixing" and it started all over again. Now, my UTXOs have more mixes (4,5,7 respectively).

So, this workaround worked, but the original approach you mentioned didn't work for me.

KYC is the only weapon that the current financial system has, in order to control Bitcoin. There is absolutely no other way to control it.

A simple way to explain it, but a little more technical:

1. The wallet software/hardware gather entropy from random sources. This entropy is 128 bits long.
2. The entropy gets hashed and the first 4 digits of the hash are appended to the entropy. Now the bits you have are 128 + 4 = 132.
3. Then the sequence is split in 12 pieces of 11 bits each.
4. Each piece is converted to decimal and you get 12 numbers that correspond to words from the BIP39 wordlist: https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0039/english.txt
5. The mnemonic phrase is converted to a seed using PBKDF2 function (it's a hashing function actually). The seed is 512 bit long.

Now, the private key is generated from this seed (the 512 bits).

So, if you know the original entropy (step 1), you can derive the seed (step 5) that produces the key.

But, technically speaking, the mnemonic words and the private key are not the same thing.

The mnemonic is nothing more than the representation of the original entropy. Is it important? Yes! Too much! It can help you recover your wallet.
The private key is also very important because it does all the work. But, you don't have to back it up, because it's much easier to backup 12 words, since you know that they will produce the same key all over again.

But sending an email is free. Inscribing ordinals isn't. Am I wrong?

Ok, but if people want to buy NFTs, for any reason (even if I don't understand it), why would they choose ordinals against other chains? This is why I believe it is somewhat of an organised attack.

But Bitcoin has a huge advantage against this. It is finite. So it may last long, but it is deterministic that at some point it must end. Am I wrong? My question is genuine, I don't mean to cause impressions. But I sincerely fail to realise why this madness keeps going on.

So don't you think it is going to stop? I mean, how many ordinals are those few people willing to create?

I don't think it is not gonna stop. Over-paying fees is a problem for all of us. At some point people will realise they keep losing money in fees and things will go back to normal. This is my estimation.

Hi mate.

The fastest way since you have an SSD in your machine is to copy the Chainstate directory and the Indexes directory to your SSD and create a symlink to look at those directories.

Here is a video with instructions. I saw a huge difference when I followed those steps:

https://youtu.be/q3zY9BbyfEU?si=DaRyT0cXRD7QbPzc

Keep in mind to copy the directories back to the original location when you are done with IBD. Also remove the symlinks.

If you need further assistance, let me know.