2 ways to avoid transaction fees

[Dabs]

Oh dear. Sorry about that. I didn't want to look as poor as I actually am. hahaha. Anyway, this will be interesting. I can wait longer if you need the time (unless you have 1000 BTC or something that has extremely high priority.)

Off-topic, but how do I rep you? There's no "rep" or "like" button unlike in other forum software, so I guess it means that I simply post that you did what you offered to do.

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[Dabs]

Actually, I can think of a solution now that you hold my private keys and can move the coins out later. That is, to send 1 or 2 BTC to each of those keys, then you can sweep them all out later. No need for 100 BTC. In order to do this with the previous example of 53 or 54 keys, you'd only need 54 BTC instead of 100 BTC.

But then, you'd have to trust me that I wouldn't get those 6 coins before you're done with the consolidation.

Right now, there are only two people who have the private keys. If it's any consolation, I'm running Bitcoin-Qt with the new wallet now, so I don't see the old keys. (I do have them backed up, and of course, I just emailed them to you.)

And, just so you can sort of trust me, I won't touch any amount you put in those keys I'll let you finish our little experiment. While I am not that religious, I am a Catholic and have faith in the newly elected Pope, and I don't want to go to hell over 6 bitcoins. (I don't want eternal damnation even for 6 million bitcoins.)

Otherwise, let's see if you can come up with other ideas.

Incidentally, would you be willing to sell me some BTC in exchange for buying you something with my credit card from some online store like Amazon? Wow, did I just think of a way to buy BTC without you having to accept reversible transactions ...

[DannyHamilton]

Actually, I can think of a solution now that you hold my private keys and can move the coins out later. That is, to send 1 or 2 BTC to each of those keys, then you can sweep them all out later. No need for 100 BTC. In order to do this with the previous example of 53 or 54 keys, you'd only need 54 BTC instead of 100 BTC.
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Bitcoin doesn't work that way.  The fee isn't based on the number of addresses, it's based on the number of inputs and outputs.  Each address can have multiple inputs and/or outputs.  I'll take a look today and see just how much dust you have distributed in there.  Then I'll work on sweeping the larger (easier/faster) bits of dust first.  There is no need for me to transfer any bitcoins to those addresses, since outputs from multiple addresses can be included in a single transaction.  The issue isn't going to be sweeping the dust.  That shouldn't be too difficult, although it may take a few days.  The issue is going to be finding a way to get the swept funds back to you.

It may turn out that I'll have to pay a 0.0005 BTC fee out of my own funds to send the final swept amount back to you. I'll hold up my commitment, I just wish I had confirmed the actual balance beforehand.

As for rep, it will be sufficient for you to state in this thread that I have delivered as promised.  That way anyone who is following this will see/know that I held up my end of the bargain.

[zvs]

i know it was already mentioned, but

The creation fee is set to 0.0005, the source can be modified to set the creation fee to 0.0001 and at that point since the relay fee is 0.0001, it'd be relayed to any pool/miner that hasn't modified the source code to change the min_relay_tx_fee..   sure, it'd be placed below all those 0.0005's, but with blocks going out at the rate they are now, you probably wouldnt have to wait any longer than at 0.0005.  maybe a block or two at most.

if something happens like several months ago when there actually was a large amt of unconfirmed transactions queue'ing up (too much satoshi dice and the declining hashrate jan-feb), you'd probably want to set the fee to 0.00050001

[Dabs]

If you manage to get the dust, you can send me coins even from another address to avoid the tx fee. You'd then have inadvertently mixed my coins (washed, laundered, anonymized) Don't worry if you think my coins are tainted (if that matters), they only went through Satoshi Dice.

I still wonder about the way bitcoin works on inputs. If you send 1 coin to 1 address and wait for 144 blocks, isn't it supposed to be able to be sent anywhere else without a fee, including all previous inputs? Or if you send 144 coins to 1 address and wait 1 block, or you send 26 coins to 1 address and wait 6 blocks.

Or I may have completely misunderstood how bitcoin works regarding separate inputs and transaction fees. I am always learning about this.

[mai77]

ideally we would have some thunderbird plugin which does mass import/export of private keys from e-mail to the btc-client (via rpc).

[DannyHamilton]

I hadn't realized that each key/address that you went me only had one input each.  This won't be too bad.

The biggest problem is going to be sending you the consolidated dust, since a fee is typically required with ANY output less than 0.01 BTC (I think).  I'll probably try creating a raw transaction with 0 fee and see if it will relay/confirm.  If it doesn't, I'll try sending it with a minimal fee.  I hope to send it to you within the next 24 hours.  I'll let you know here if I run into any delays.

[Dabs]

Yes, do the zero fee. I can wait all week. I will be praying (going to church and stuff) anyways until Easter Sunday, and I will not be online after tomorrow. You can send me more than the dust, and I will return the difference (after ageing it, or by next week) so we both don't pay a fee.

[mai77]

when you transmit / import a private wallet key, you gotta hurry to spend the stuff before the other guy does. keep that in mind.

but usually its tiny sums so it won't matter much

[mai77]

a lot many threads deal with the fee problem in BTC

it is exacerbated by the rise of the BTC exchange rate

[BeetcoinScummer]

I just found the login to an old Silk Road account that had about 30 BTC in "change" that I'd left in there over a year ago.

If you are familiar with SR you'd know that they use 0 fee transactions for BTC withdrawals.

Well I decided to withdraw the now valuable coins back into my wallet but the Tx took almost 24 hours to get the first confirmation because there was no way to add a fee. Is that what you really want?

[Dabs]

Back. Well, @BeetcoinScummer, maybe for 30 coins, you might want even the minimal fee. However, if it's 30 coming from 1 input, shouldn't it be very high priority by now? Several months of confirmations?

Actually, if you are the only one with the private key, you can wait for it, eventually it will get included in a block, with that much (30) coins.

[MPOE-PR]

How about just pay the damned fees. It's a few cents. Freedom as in speech, not as in beer ffs.

[Dansker]

Would it be possible to simply abandon the smallest dust you have in your wallet?

I have both dust and not-dust, and I'm pretty confused by all this, and maybe just abandoning the lowest amounts would be best?

[prezbo]

I just found the login to an old Silk Road account that had about 30 BTC in "change" that I'd left in there over a year ago.

If you are familiar with SR you'd know that they use 0 fee transactions for BTC withdrawals.

Well I decided to withdraw the now valuable coins back into my wallet but the Tx took almost 24 hours to get the first confirmation because there was no way to add a fee. Is that what you really want?

It is up to the market to decide, there's nothing anyone can really do about it. Or, you know, you could use/create a less shitty alternative - one that supports adding a fee.

[nimda]

Dust is easy enough to handle.

• Never create a transaction more than 10 KB
• Never create an output less than 0.01 BTC
• Use compressed privkeys
• For every 250 bytes, your tx must include an input of 1-day-old 1 BTC, or 2-day-old 0.5 BTC, etc.

Boom.
Another tactic is to send yourself a huge amount of change. If you want to send someone 0.01 BTC, using your own 0.01 BTC input, also include a 1 BTC input and a 1 BTC output back to you. The TX will confirm as long as soon as the 1 BTC is a few days old.

Notice this transaction from my donation address: 51 inputs, 9218 bytes, 0 fees. Consolidates a lot of dust, and it could have handled a bit more dust. This is how you spend things like SatoshiDICE dust without losing money.

[mai77]

nimda, does one need "coin control" app to do that?

[Dansker]

Dust is easy enough to handle.

• Never create a transaction more than 10 KB
• Never create an output less than 0.01 BTC
• Use compressed privkeys
• For every 250 bytes, your tx must include an input of 1-day-old 1 BTC, or 2-day-old 0.5 BTC, etc.

Boom.
Another tactic is to send yourself a huge amount of change. If you want to send someone 0.01 BTC, using your own 0.01 BTC input, also include a 1 BTC input and a 1 BTC output back to you. The TX will confirm as long as soon as the 1 BTC is a few days old.

Notice this transaction from my donation address: 51 inputs, 9218 bytes, 0 fees. Consolidates a lot of dust, and it could have handled a bit more dust. This is how you spend things like SatoshiDICE dust without losing money.

Probably easy for you, but not for an end-user like me. All I can do is look at the GUI and weep.

[nimda]

nimda, does one need "coin control" app to do that?

For the most part. Although if you send a large amount to an address with dust on it, wait several days, and then spend a carefully chosen value from that address, you can consolidate dust without fees.