I am new this and have recently purchased £500 worth of Bitcoin on Blockchain.info. I am trying to transfer the balance into my Electrum desktop wallet and notice that the transfer fee is around £24 regardless of how little I want to transfer. I thought that the transfer fee depended on the number of bytes you were sending? I wanted to test it out first by sending say £50 but the fee is still £24. I know I can customise and reduce the fee, they currently recommend a minimum of 518 sat/B which is still around £12. Obviously I will now transfer the whole lot out in one go, but this still seems to be very expensive way to transfer funds so am I missing something?
I think you're confusing transaction size in regards to the amount you'll be sending. To make it simple, if you want to send a £50 and there's only 1 input and output and on the other hand, you try to send £25 and there's 2 input and outputs, the needed transaction fee of the second scenario will be much higher than the first one. Higher amount doesn't matter in regards to transaction fees (as long as the involved input and outputs are the same), so that's why the cost for the transaction fee remained the same.
Also take note that 518 sat/B is just the minimum (if you use that, you'll end up with unconfirmed transaction for a long time) and shouldn't be considered the recommended fee (at the moment the recommended fee is 960 sat/B).
Source:
https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/#fees
On a side note: Since there's a huge backlog of unconfirmed transactions (lately), it wouldn't be advisable to make small transactions (simply isn't worth the cost).
