How is the "Spendable" amount calculated

[phil16814]

Hello there,

I have a blockchain.info wallet and I want to send all my balance (0.01316878 BTC) to my MyCelium wallet.
When I try to send them, I select the "Use total available minus fee" button and the amount available to transfer is 0.00156555 BTC with a Regular fee of 0.00135388 BTC.
That means that of my total balance of 0.01316878, after sending the "total available minus fee" there would be 0.01024935 BTC unaccounted for.

I'd like to know why I can't send the totality of my balance to another address. How is the "total available" or "Spendable" amount calculated?

This is an address I used to collect the earnings from faucets sometime ago so it has a lot of small inputs. I'm thinking this has something to do with it but don't know for sure.

Thanks in advance

[achow101]

If your wallet has received a lot of small payments, then it is possible that the value of each of those payments is too small so that the entirety of the input value is consumed by fees when you spend from them. Since you say you have collected faucet earnings, I suspect this is the case.

[phil16814]

If your wallet has received a lot of small payments, then it is possible that the value of each of those payments is too small so that the entirety of the input value is consumed by fees when you spend from them. Since you say you have collected faucet earnings, I suspect this is the case.

So does this mean that I can't use those funds? Is there some way to combine all the small transactions into a single large one?

[DannyHamilton]

So does this mean that I can't use those funds?

You can wait an hope that transaction fees are much lower in the future.

Is there some way to combine all the small transactions into a single large one?

Only by creating a transaction and paying the necessary fee to get the transaction confirmed.

However, if transaction fees happen to get much lower in the future, and you aren't in a hurry for confirmations on the transaction, then you might be able to get a transaction with very low fee transaction confirmed eventually.

[phil16814]

What would happen if I use a small custom fee?
Do I risk losing it all?
I'm not very clear as to what happens in the mempool...

Can I use a small fee and cross my fingers and if it isn't cleared in a week or so try it again with a slightly higher fee and so on?

[aleksej996]

That regular fee is normal for a one input transaction at this time when fees are very high.
That fee amounts to around 4$ per a regular transaction, of one input.

You probably have around 9-10 inputs, so that would easily amount to around 40$ that is around your total balance.

You should wait for the fees to go down. Just wait, in future there will be lower fees and price of bitcoin will be bigger. So more you wait the better.

If you use a smaller fee then maybe eventually the mempool will get rid of it as it is just taking up space or if it might stick around long enough for it to be confirmed. I would really just wait if I was you. In less then 12 hours segwit will activate and that means that new transactions could be made that take up less space. This will decrease fees as there will be more space in blocks. In almost exactly 3 months there will be a hardfork that will increase the size of blocks as well. So longer you wait, the better.