What is the minimum amount of bitcoin can be send?

[Findingnemo]

Just asking out of curiosity! I never sent any dust amount from my wallet.

Last night I was helping a friend to install a new bitcoin wallet from electrum before he was using a shit web wallet and successfully installed it on Android but I thought it would be better to teach him about how to make transaction from the electrum wallet.

So I tried to sent 300sats to his address which is segwit and mine too but the electrum keep giving me a warning that dust amount can't be broadtcast or something like that. But the minimum value of bitcoin is 1 sat then we can able to transact it right but why not possible on such case?

Issue with electrum or applies to every wallet!

[xhomerx10]

Just asking out of curiosity! I never sent any dust amount from my wallet.

Last night I was helping a friend to install a new bitcoin wallet from electrum before he was using a shit web wallet and successfully installed it on Android but I thought it would be better to teach him about how to make transaction from the electrum wallet.

So I tried to sent 300sats to his address which is segwit and mine too but the electrum keep giving me a warning that dust amount can't be broadtcast or something like that. But the minimum using of bitcoin is 1 sat then we can able to transact it right but why not possible on such case?

Issue with electrum or applies to every wallet!

 I don't believe initially there was a limit but devs changed it to 5460 sats to prevent spamming.  

edit: Wow!  That's almost two bucks US now!!

edit2: Nice hat by the way.

[suchmoon]

Depends on the input/output types. It's 3 times the minimum fee (1 sat per byte) so for p2pkh TX it would be 546 sat and for native segwit it can be as low as ~300 sat IIRC.

[Findingnemo]

I don't believe initially there was a limit but devs changed it to 5460 sats to prevent spamming.  

edit: Wow!  That's almost two bucks US now!!

edit2: Nice hat by the way.

Surprisingly blockchain.com allows to send 546 satoshis which is the minimum possible value and posted on their official site itself by the support few days back.

What is the minimum amount I can send?

The minimum amount of bitcoin you can send in a transaction is 546 Satoshis, which is equivalent to .00000546 BTC.

Creator of the hat getting amazed at it.

Depends on the input/output types. It's 3 times the minimum fee (1 sat per byte) so for p2pkh TX it would be 546 sat and for native segwit it can be as low as ~300 sat IIRC.

I remembered it correctly, exactly sent 300sats from native segwit to native segwit with fee of 6sat/byte which placed at 0.5 mb from mempool.And tried the same amount 3 times then lost my patience and send few dollars.

[pooya87]

The actual minimum amount to send is 0 which means if there were no standard rules you could spam the blockchain with 0 outputs and also spending them with 0 fee to create new 0 outputs!
Right now the only way to set the amount to zero and have a standard transaction is if the output is an OP_RETURN one.

[ranochigo]

Your wallet is probably talking about the minimum relay fee as opposed to the dust limit.

The dust limit is usually defined on a node policy as opposed to a network policy. The reason why a transaction that spends dust could be rejected is because the node considers it as a dust and thus non-standard. Otherwise, it could be mined if a miner is willing to mine it, just that you're likely to be experiencing poor propagation due to it hitting the node's dust limit. The dust limit used to be defined in terms of the minimum relay fee but it's currently defined in terms of the dustrelayfee.

The default limit for dustrelayfee (for reference nodes) is actually 3satoshi/vbyte, thus for a transaction that sends to a P2PKH address (ie it's output), this sets it at 546satoshis or 294satoshis for P2PWKH. This makes it such that it will not cost more to spend the dust than it's actual value.

[hugeblack]

There is a difference between the smallest amount that can be sent from a wallet and the minimum amount of bitcoin can be send or that the network can accepted.
Wallets like electrum are apps that enable you to easily send and manage your private keys, and often beginners may set some limits.
Therefore, the number of input, output, and type of addresses, and network fees are what determine  the minimum amount.

[o_e_l_e_o]

The relevant code is here: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/4a540683ec40393d6369da1a9e02e45614db936d/src/policy/policy.cpp#L14

[Findingnemo]

Thanks for all the replies here, I think I understood the things right from above post(s).


The minimum value we can send in any bitcoin wallet is going to be 546 satoshis for standard transactions and it can be changed in the future or it will be the permanent limit to eliminate the blockchain spam with dust amounts?

[pooya87]

The minimum value we can send in any bitcoin wallet is going to be 546 satoshis for standard transactions and it can be changed in the future or it will be the permanent limit to eliminate the blockchain spam with dust amounts?

Dust amount, similar to transaction fees, partly depends on bitcoin price. Long ago 0.546BTC wasn't worth a cent and transactions paid 0.001BTC fee, now 0.00000546 is about 16 cents. When price grows higher and fees eventually adjust to that very high price, this threshold also has to be reduced. eg. when 546 satoshi is worth $54.