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March 13, 2013, 05:25:58 PM |
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Most nodes won't relay a transaction (sending it throughout the network) or mine it (put in into the global transaction history) if it is trying to send less than 0.01 BTC without a fee. And for amounts as small as 0.01, it has to be very old coins to be accepted, since if they're newly moved they're indistinguishable from "spam" (lots of transactions moving from one address to another just to take up space). For collections of lots of little amounts, it may be even harder to send without a fee, since each and every "input" (a transaction that got sent to you) needs to get signed, and each of those signatures takes up space.
For a total that small, consolidating into one address might help with the size of subsequent transactions, but it won't help that the total will still be under 0.01.
Now, if the value of BTC keeps on going up, it's possible that miners and nodes will lower their threshold to lower than 0.01. So you may be able to just be patient and wait for bitcoins to be worth bazillions of dollars each. But until then, you're trying to move around very little value. And even if you do spend it, a 0.0005 BTC fee is still a lot smaller than the fee for a credit card charge or what it'd cost to mail a check, so even though we're used to everything on the Internet being "free", put it in perspective.
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