Electrum transfer fee?

[bitsadness223]

Finally decided to test out buying and transferring a small $20 worth of bitcoins. Bought the bitcoins using Paxful and decided to transfer it to Electrum wallet. Everything went smoothly but Electrum says the transaction fee was $46 so my bitcoin wallet on electrum says -$26. So I guess my question is should I not be doing these types of trasfers at such a low amount and at what amount would be good to do a transaction. I aint to butthurt at loosing $20 bucks but damn that transaction fee is freaking huge why in the world would anyone use that unless they were billionaires lol, No seriously that's crazy

[HCP]

That isn't an Electrum fee. If you sent FROM Paxful TO Electrum, then the transfer fee you see is what Paxful paid to send the BTC to your Electrum wallet.

If you look up the transaction on a block explorer like https://blockchain.info you will no doubt see that Paxful "batch" up payments... and have spent that fee not just on YOUR transfer, but on sending BTC to a LOT of people all at once.

Although, something is wrong if Electrum says -$26... it shouldn't care what the transaction fee for an INCOMING transaction is.

[bitsadness223]

Thanks for getting back to me. Yeah i quickly figured that part out that paxful was the one to charge me the transaction fee I was just astounded that a fee could be so high not to mention there was no indication of a fee. My electrum does indicate at the time that it was -$26 now of coarse it has gone down to -23,-24 (keeps changing) (and I'm just converting the bitcoin into usd) I know i don't owe anything it just means I'm at $0 but man $46 for transferring $20 is pretty incredible, If my bank did that I would have told them I'm getting a lawyer and i would have shut my account down and taken whatever i could get. Bitcoin sure has a steep learning curve, one that I'm not willing to go through. But hey $20 bucks isn't anything to worry about was just curious about that transfer fee which I ended up having to look up and found a lot of info here and a few other places. Thank you again for getting back to me hopefully you are more successful than I in the bitcoin market and I wish you all the best.

[HCP]

Like I said... paxful probably didn't charge that entire fee to you. You probably paid a fraction of that.

Paxful tend to batch up withdrawal requests from several users and send them all out in one transaction... this keeps transaction costs down. From what I understand Paxful charge a "fixed" fee for a withdrawal... 0.0008 BTC, which given the current cost of BTC is still quite substantial (~12-13 USD).

I also see here: https://kb.paxful.com/knowledgebase/what-about-sending-out-bitcoins-from-my-wallet-and-the-bitcoin-network-miner-fees-who-pays-and-when/

That they will add that withdrawal fee and put your account into a negative balance... so I assume the negative value you are looking at is in Paxful... NOT in Electrum?

[Abdussamad]

where did you download electrum from? what does it say in the bottom left of the electrum window?