Hi all,
I've been looking at collecting up a number of very small amounts of Bitcoin I have lying around in various wallets, and combining them into one wallet.
I'm a little worried about the transaction fees though....I don't understand well how they work, but transaction fee charts that I found show insane numbers ($28 average fee). This makes it impractical for me to transfer what would probably be considered dust.
In the longer term, I'd like to also know more about how transferring between exchanges and cashing out is impacted by this. (BitPanda -> exchange -> another exchange -> BitPanda -> out).
Am I missing a trick?
All advice appreciated.
No, this is indeed quite normal. You're sending lots of small amounts of bitcoin from different adresses. ( or simply different UTXOS), which greatly ramps up the amount of bytes your transaction is, and thus the amount of fees it'll take for you to transfer the funds.
In the longer term, I'd like to also know more about how transferring between exchanges and cashing out is impacted by this. (BitPanda -> exchange -> another exchange -> BitPanda -> out).
What exactly do you mean by this? I'd recommend using an altcoin if you're going to transfer money between exchanges. This greatly reduces the fees. ( Something like Ethereum or Litecoin.)
The best thing you can do now ( in my opinion) is combine all your small UTXO's into one transaction, send them to an exchange adress with a fee of ~25sat/byte, and either use
https://pool.viabtc.com/tools/txaccelerator/ or ask someone here in all these services threads to "accelerate"/speed up your transaction.
Then exchange them to an altcoin which has cheaper tx fees to then sent them to the next exchange?