Hello guys, im completely new to electrum and it might be stupid thing i don't get. I put some bitcoins into my wallet and tried to send them, but the mining fee is so huge that it must be some kind of mistake. For example if i try to send 0.0089 the fee i get is 0.12656. Could you help me to sort it out, cuz it feels like i just lost everything i put there, huge thanks!
The fee is calculated based on the size of the transaction.
The size of the transaction depends on the amount of inputs and outputs.
If you filled your wallet with dust inputs (for example, faucet earnings), it is well possible the wallet decides to add a huge fee when using hundreds of dust inputs to create one or two outputs.
For example: you requested a payment of 0.001 at 1000 faucets... This adds up to 1
BTCYou want to spend this one BTC:
The size of your transaction is estimated as:
in*180 + out*34 + 10 plus or minus 'in'
1000*180+1*34+10 = 180044 bytes.
https://bitcoinfees.21.co/ teaches us you should add 80 satoshi's per byte to have a 90% chance of getting in the next couple of blocks...
180044*80 = 14403520 satoshi's = ~0.145
BTC fee
At the other end of the spectrum: if you bought 1
BTC from an exchange at once, your address has 1 inputs. When you want to spend this input, your fee would be (1*180+44)*80 = 17920 satoshi's (0.0001792
BTC)
In both virtual cases, you're spending 1
BTC worth of inputs, but in the first case you need to pay 1000 times more in fees to get a decent chance of getting added to a block in a short period of time.
Could you verify if you funded your wallet all at once, or with loads of small inputs?