Bitpay / wallet question - transaction too low to spend

[gardeneel]

ahoy!
fairly new to all of this, so feel free to ask a question if i don't give the information needed.

i have a couple transactions that were sent to my bitpay wallet from mining altcoins on zpool.
zpool sent me .003 btc, but in my bitpay wallet it shows this transaction is too low to spend.
i know the fee's are quite high right now.  if all that dies down again in a week or month, will it be cheap to send again?

am i making a high co-pay (lots of transactions that will ultimately result in a high fee) by getting paid
in roughly .003 payments from mining pools?     

if i save this amount up in my offline wallet, is that the best idea?
just mine and save? then hope it keeps going up, and sell / re-invest in a year or so?

thanks. kind of confused.   
was mining about a week or two ago and could buy a $50 gift card no problem using btc.
now TX fee's are just too high for my small transactions.  (excited to read about proposed solutions and i have faith something will work out eventually)

[Potato Chips]

i have a couple transactions that were sent to my bitpay wallet from mining altcoins on zpool.
zpool sent me .003 btc, but in my bitpay wallet it shows this transaction is too low to spend.
i know the fee's are quite high right now.  if all that dies down again in a week or month, will it be cheap to send again?

Bitpay provided an explanation about that. Quoting it for you:

What does the BitPay wallet's warning "amount too low to spend" mean?

This warning means that the incoming transaction is smaller than current recommended bitcoin network fee. If you try to redeem this bitcoin amount in the future, the fee required by the Bitcoin network may be higher than the amount itself.

And yes the high miner fees today are caused by the network congestion (270K+ unconfirmed transactions as of now) which is why if it's not urgent it's not advisable to send bitcoin especially if its a low amount. When the network has stabilized, fees will be reduced.

am i making a high co-pay (lots of transactions that will ultimately result in a high fee) by getting paid
in roughly .003 payments from mining pools?    

Aside from the current network condition, Miner fees also depends on your transaction's size like how many inputs and outputs does it have.
Essentially if you are accepting lots of dust payments, you will have many inputs. In your case, I believe that .003BTC is not a dust amount although it will always be better to receive larger amounts.

You might wanna read this: https://news.bitcoin.com/how-to-calculate-bitcoin-transaction-fees-when-youre-in-a-hurry

if i save this amount up in my offline wallet, is that the best idea?
just mine and save? then hope it keeps going up, and sell / re-invest in a year or so?

Offline wallet? You mean cold storage? What kind of cold storage is it?. Well cold storage are the best although some kinds are hard to use imo like paper wallets.
If you know you will be using a portion of your funds frequently, Hardware wallets like ledger or trezor are a good choice although they're not free.

Essentially, Desktop wallets are also safe as long as you keep your pc clean, store your seed in a safe place, encrypt your wallet with a strong password.

[alyssa85]

ahoy!
fairly new to all of this, so feel free to ask a question if i don't give the information needed.

i have a couple transactions that were sent to my bitpay wallet from mining altcoins on zpool.
zpool sent me .003 btc, but in my bitpay wallet it shows this transaction is too low to spend.
i know the fee's are quite high right now.  if all that dies down again in a week or month, will it be cheap to send again?

am i making a high co-pay (lots of transactions that will ultimately result in a high fee) by getting paid
in roughly .003 payments from mining pools?     

if i save this amount up in my offline wallet, is that the best idea?
just mine and save? then hope it keeps going up, and sell / re-invest in a year or so?

thanks. kind of confused.   
was mining about a week or two ago and could buy a $50 gift card no problem using btc.
now TX fee's are just too high for my small transactions.  (excited to read about proposed solutions and i have faith something will work out eventually)

It's possible that the mining fees don't drop for a while. Do they allow you to get paid in another coin?

(You could save up all your inputs, and then spend them, but the more inputs in a transaction the higher the fee you need to pay - the fees are based on the total bytes you send. Bitcoin is broken for small amounts, so I really recommend being paid in another coin if that is possible).

[gardeneel]

i have a couple transactions that were sent to my bitpay wallet from mining altcoins on zpool.
zpool sent me .003 btc, but in my bitpay wallet it shows this transaction is too low to spend.
i know the fee's are quite high right now.  if all that dies down again in a week or month, will it be cheap to send again?

Bitpay provided an explanation about that. Quoting it for you:

What does the BitPay wallet's warning "amount too low to spend" mean?

This warning means that the incoming transaction is smaller than current recommended bitcoin network fee. If you try to redeem this bitcoin amount in the future, the fee required by the Bitcoin network may be higher than the amount itself.

And yes the high miner fees today are caused by the network congestion (270K+ unconfirmed transactions as of now) which is why if it's not urgent it's not advisable to send bitcoin especially if its a low amount. When the network has stabilized, fees will be reduced.

am i making a high co-pay (lots of transactions that will ultimately result in a high fee) by getting paid
in roughly .003 payments from mining pools?    

Aside from the current network condition, Miner fees also depends on your transaction's size like how many inputs and outputs does it have.
Essentially if you are accepting lots of dust payments, you will have many inputs. In your case, I believe that .003BTC is not a dust amount although it will always be better to receive larger amounts.

You might wanna read this: https://news.bitcoin.com/how-to-calculate-bitcoin-transaction-fees-when-youre-in-a-hurry

if i save this amount up in my offline wallet, is that the best idea?
just mine and save? then hope it keeps going up, and sell / re-invest in a year or so?

Offline wallet? You mean cold storage? What kind of cold storage is it?. Well cold storage are the best although some kinds are hard to use imo like paper wallets.
If you know you will be using a portion of your funds frequently, Hardware wallets like ledger or trezor are a good choice although they're not free.

Essentially, Desktop wallets are also safe as long as you keep your pc clean, store your seed in a safe place, encrypt your wallet with a strong password.

thanks for such a comprehensive reply!
lot's of information to consider :]

i ended up buying a trezor wallet, so i'll be transferring btc to that probably and just saving.  i think i'm in it for the gamble :]
going to mine what i can, and hopefully it pays off within a couple years. if not, i won't ever get in over my head. ( already paid for the gpu's i have ).

i CAN get paid in other coins from some pools, but not sure if i will go that route yet.
sort of have the most faith in BTC for some reason. but i would like to grab a bit of the alt market as well.
i've only got like $200 worth of BTC right now so it's nothing crazy.
just makes me want to save seeing the purchases i made in like 2013 and what they would be worth now if i had saved

i still find the co-pay idea a bit confusing, but get the basics of it.
essentially lots of change is harder to deal with than getting paid in a $100's.
not much i can do about it though, my payouts will probably be around .003 on average.
so however those payment sizes add to the cost is what i must do.
some pools i have seen let you set a custom payout amount, so i may look into that eventually too.

[Potato Chips]

i ended up buying a trezor wallet, so i'll be transferring btc to that probably and just saving.  i think i'm in it for the gamble :]
going to mine what i can, and hopefully it pays off within a couple years. if not, i won't ever get in over my head. ( already paid for the gpu's i have ).

You're mining bitcoins with gpu's? Have you tried getting an ASIC? as they are more profitable than gpu's because from what I know they are created specifically for bitcoin.
You can know more about it here: https://www.bitmain.com. In case you haven't noticed, we also have boards dedicated for mining: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=14.0

i still find the co-pay idea a bit confusing, but get the basics of it.
essentially lots of change is harder to deal with than getting paid in a $100's.
not much i can do about it though, my payouts will probably be around .003 on average.
so however those payment sizes add to the cost is what i must do.
some pools i have seen let you set a custom payout amount, so i may look into that eventually too.

Well if a lots of inputs is inevitable, your best bet is to send them when the mempool is stablized or pretty much empty and when it's like that, you can even set your fee a little lower than the recommended fee if it's not urgent.

You can use the following guides to calculate fee's

• https://bitcoinfees.earn.com
• https://btc.com/stats/unconfirmed-tx
• https://estimatefee.com

[gardeneel]

i am mining alt coins and getting paid via pools that let me pick the currency. so i picked BTC.

having problems with it though.

last night was mining nist5 on zpool.
i have 6 gpus that are showing over 300 m/h
checked the logs for the whole holiday + overnight, zpool shows 4 m/h...
and my amount owed barely went up at all. it should have gone up a LOT more.
maybe an issue with zpool at the moment. my log shows correct numbers,
and usually i get .001 with just 1 of those computers setup per day.
and i got .0002 with TWO machines setup.

this is all kind of so confusing and convoluted, it's part of why i have faith that there is still time to get in and get profit if you save for a while. but tbh stuff like this is pretty annoying.