How to cheaply pay someone

[wunderkrakon]

I have a certain amount of Bitcoin, not much at all, in my old blockchain.info account.
It seems that in order to pay someone a small sum e.g. US$1 from that account I'd have to pay more for the transaction than is in the account.
Is this a common situation nowadays?
What is the workaround?
If my money is in the blockchain, how can blockchain.info control it?

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[hubballi]

I have a certain amount of Bitcoin, not much at all, in my old blockchain.info account.
It seems that in order to pay someone a small sum e.g. US$1 from that account I'd have to pay more for the transaction than is in the account.
Is this a common situation nowadays?
What is the workaround?
If my money is in the blockchain, how can blockchain.info control it?

That was before when transaction fees was high, but today the transaction fees is very low that even for sending $1 the transaction fees is lower then that .

If you have the private keys for the wallet then you are in control if not then the wallet is not yours and you are not in control of it.

[HeRetiK]

If you have a lot of small inputs, for example due to using faucets a lot, your transactions can get quite big (data-wise) and thus become rather expensive.

In general transaction fees should currently be a couple of cents. You can save on fees for future transactions by moving your coins to a SegWit address (either P2SH starting with "3" or Bech32 starting with "bc1").

The days were it made sense to send a single dollar on-chain are over, however. Currently Bitcoin is not quite feasible for micro-transactions but this might change if Lightning Network becomes more widespread.

[joniboini]

If my money is in the blockchain, how can blockchain.info control it?

They don't have control over your money unless they store your private key on their website or something like that. You should switch to other wallets such as Electrum as you can change the fees as low as possible. Keep in mind that network congestion will affect how much fees you have to pay.

[bob123]

Is this a common situation nowadays?

No.

As Herektik said, this only applies if you have a lot of small inputs, which do increase the size of your transaction.

The transaction fee is based on the size of your transaction. Bigger size -> higher transaction fee.

What is the workaround?

The easiest would bet to export your seed and import it into any other wallet (e.g. electrum) which lets you set the fee on your own.

If my money is in the blockchain, how can blockchain.info control it?

Your BTC's are recorded on the blockchain.

But the private keys to access these BTC's are stored on blockchain.info's server.

They claim that the private keys are only stored encrypted on their server, but to be sure you'd better use some non-online wallet (e.g. desktop- / mobile- / hardware wallet).

[logitechwow]

There's no workaround, you pay for your transaction to be processed. This is normal

[BQ]

if you just want to pay to someone (not a store or something), why not just use a cheaper alternative?

[Alluro]

You can customize the transaction fee in the Blockchain wallet. But low transaction fee takes a long time to confirm your transaction. If you don't have a problem with transaction speed, you can use a low transaction fee.

[jossiel]

Like hubbali said, it is before that you need to pay $5 fee for the $1 transaction that you are about to send. That's because there's a network spam during those days when bitcoin is on all time high. But now you don't have any problem with it, you can pay as low as $0.001 for your transaction.

You can customize the transaction fee in the Blockchain wallet.

That's right, since he is using blockchain.info (now .com), it will be easier for him to reduce the fee if he finds it too expensive for him to send $1.

If my money is in the blockchain, how can blockchain.info control it?

They provide you their mnemonic words/phrases so as long as you have it, you can recover your bitcoin on your wallet there.

[abhibtccc]

I have a certain amount of Bitcoin, not much at all, in my old blockchain.info account.
It seems that in order to pay someone a small sum e.g. US$1 from that account I'd have to pay more for the transaction than is in the account.
Is this a common situation nowadays?
What is the workaround?
If my money is in the blockchain, how can blockchain.info control it?

You can pay 1 sat/B too but make sure that the transaction has a feature added to it which is RBF. Many wallets offer such feature by default. Blockchain wallet needs to develop itself a bit.

[Buttermellow]

If my money is in the blockchain, how can blockchain.info control it?

They don't have control over your money unless they store your private key on their website or something like that.

Private key must be kept safety and should not store on the website. It never did a website to ask for your private key unless the website is a phishing website that will disclose the details of your wallet that includes your private key. It should never be like that and must be careful in visiting website to avoid getting phished out.

You must bookmark websites to have a better access every time when you visit a website. Usually when you do not have a hardware wallet and instead you are using a web wallet. So, be careful all the time. Scammers, fraudsters and hackers are everywhere in this forum.