Bitcoin Core error - "The transaction amount is too small to pay the fee"

[sh4wnBTC]

Greetings Forum users,

 I've been going through my old bitcoin wallets, and found one with some coins.
I had the private key and was able to restore the BTC wallet to Bitcoin Core.

However, when I try to send this to my Coinbase account, I get the error "The transaction amount is too small to pay the fee".
I haven't sent BTC via Bitcoin Core since 2017 so I may be doing something wrong.

I'm trying to send the entire amount and have clicked the "Use available balance" to fill in the amount to send. The "Subtract fee from amount" box is also checked. So I would think the wallet would subtract the mining fee and send the remaining balance.

I realize the miner fee isn't as low as it was back in 2017, but is the miner fee really 100s of euros these days, or am I doing something wrong?

Note! I only had the private key, and no pass-phrase. Not even sure I used one back then.

Appreciate any help.

Using Bitcoin Core v0.20.1 on Windows 10 computer.

(edit, fixed minor grammatical mistakes)

[ranochigo]

The minimum amount of fees would be 1 satoshi/byte. Are you using the recommended fees or the custom fees? If you could, you can possibly set it to the lowest amount but it probably won't be confirmed anytime soon.

You might have quite a few small UTXOs and the size of your transaction could've been relatively big. How many transactions have you received using that specific wallet file? The transaction fee rates has been fairly high recently as well.

[NeuroticFish]

I realize the miner fee isn't as low as it was back in 2017, but is the miner fee really 100s of euros these days, or am I doing something wrong?

Miner fee is quite high these days, but it's not fixed. It depends on what you want to send, and not as total. It depends on how you got those coins.
I mean that if your money comes from faucets, for example, and it's a lot of small amounts, the fee will be indeed high. (As an analogy, if you want to send a couple tons of pennies, you'll have to pay for the truck rental too. It doesn't matter if the total is a few hundreds of $.)
I don't know if that's the case, it's you who has to tell us. If it's the case, you may read this thread [Jan 2021] Fees are low, use this opportunity to Consolidate your small inputs! and with some patience find a good moment to use the small fees in in your advantage.

Also the fee the wallet wants to pay is an estimation. And I don't know how good that estimation is. More advanced users set custom fee.
But I didn't use Bitcoin core as main wallet for quite a while, so others may give you better ideas.

[sh4wnBTC]

Hello and thanks for the quick replies.

Regarding transactions:
The wallet contains a total of 920+- transactions. (ranging from 2013 to 2017)
I'd say 80% are incoming transactions, and the remaining 20% are outgoing transactions.

Regarding the fee:
I am using the automatic "recommended" which is set at 0.00032521 BTC/kB.
I've also tried lowering the "Confirmation time target" to get a lower fee, but the difference is minuscule.

It seems like setting the fee manually could solve the problem. But it also seems that the size of this transaction will be quite large.
I don't have any issue with waiting days or weeks. I would just like to avoid the coins becoming unusable.

Any tips on how to find a minimal fee and estimate how big this transaction would be in byes or kB?

[LoyceV]

I don't have any issue with waiting days or weeks. I would just like to avoid the coins becoming unusable.

You're going to want to read this: Consolidate your small inputs!

Any tips on how to find a minimal fee and estimate how big this transaction would be in byes or kB?

Bitcoin Core tells you the transaction size when you manually select Inputs. See https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#0,30d for fees. In general, Sundays are best. With this many inputs, I would just be patient, set 1 sat/byte, and wait for it. If you enable Coin Control in Settings, you can manually select which Inputs to use for your transaction. It may be worth picking only the largest ones, or creating several transactions with 50-ish inputs.

[sh4wnBTC]

I don't have any issue with waiting days or weeks. I would just like to avoid the coins becoming unusable.

You're going to want to read this: Consolidate your small inputs!

Any tips on how to find a minimal fee and estimate how big this transaction would be in byes or kB?

Bitcoin Core tells you the transaction size when you manually select Inputs. See https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#0,30d for fees. In general, Sundays are best. With this many inputs, I would just be patient, set 1 sat/byte, and wait for it. If you enable Coin Control in Settings, you can manually select which Inputs to use for your transaction. It may be worth picking only the largest ones, or creating several transactions with 50-ish inputs.

Amazing. I'll check that out asap.
Thank you very much all 3 of you. You've been more than helpful!