I just found out something about BTC transactions

[CYBER_COWBOY]

Last week i downloaded Exodus wallet to my phone, to keep some BTC!
My plane was to send BTC when I had some over from other wallets sometimes every week.
I have made ten deposits there between $10-$25 (total amount 0.00470781BTC $136.01)
Today I wanted to send some BTC to another of my wallets and I saw the transaction fee was $31 (0.00115BTC) of course did i not send any money when I saw that.
I already knew that the transactions fee is very high at the moment! But this was way to high so I asked support why this was so...
And I got a very interesting answer that i had no qlue about and never seen before.


So basically if you have a BTC wallet and you receive BTC worth of $10 x 20 then you have BTC worth of $200.
If you later want to send them to another wallet, it will cost you more then if you had receive $200 x 1 instead.


I will copy/paste the answer I got from Exodus support after my question to them about the high transaction fee.

"
Hi ______,

Thanks for reaching back out to Exodus Support. Please allow me to step in for ______, who is currently offline.

______, I've read your previous messages and I can see you are being charged really high network fees.

After taking a look at the address you have kindly provided, I understand what is happening. Let me explain, it's going to be a little technical:

______, Bitcoin is a UTXO based asset. UTXO stands for Unspent Transaction Output, and each UTXO refers to each of the payments you have received in your BTC address.

This UTXO model is based entirely on individual transactions, grouped in blocks. We can compare this to people holding certain amounts of cash.

    A user that holds 50 BTC might be in control of a single UTXO worth 50 BTC, or a combination of UTXOs (payments) that add up to 50 BTC.
    Comparing it to cash, if a user has $50, he might hold a single $50 bill or a combination of smaller denominations of bills and coins.


Just as it is harder to count $50 with a combination of smaller denominations of bills and coins, synchronizing your address to the blockchain becomes much harder when transactions happen more frequently.

Therefore, when you have several payouts received, the Bitcoin miners need to do more work to process your transaction. Then, transactions with more data (such as more UTXOs) are more expensive.

How does this relate in your case?

After looking at your address in the blockchain, it looks like you have 10 recent incoming transactions since April 27, 2023, that you have not spent. In other words, you have 10 UTXOs that altogether make up 0.00470781 BTC ($136.01 at the time I wrote this message). You can see your address in the blockchain here:

    https://mempool.space/address/____________________________________


Unfortunately, transferring these funds is going to be more expensive than usual, simply because of the fact that your transaction would be more complicated to process than any other regular transaction.

If you wait until the fees go lower, the price may be down too, but it's likely gonna be an expensive transaction either way, considering the number of UTXOs you have.

You can try using the custom fees feature and choose your own transaction fees:

    How to enable custom fees for Bitcoin?


However, if you set a really low fee, the miners will likely ignore your transaction and process the ones that paid more This would make your funds stuck for a long time until you pay a higher fee.

______, for the future and to prevent any problems when sending BTC, I suggest avoiding receiving many small payments, and instead, it would be a better idea to receive larger payouts not so frequently.

I hope this information is helpful! Please let me know if you need further assistance or if there's anything that you're unsure about.

Kind regards,
______

"

Thanks to Exodus for explaining so good!


EDIT:
But is this also if you want to send for example $15 once. Then this should not be a problem since it dont need to take money from more then "one deposit/transaction"? since atleast one deposit was $25

[Darker45]

I'm amazed at how the Exodus support is explaining things in a simple and detailed way. Even a crypto layman could grasp what it means. It isn't an automated response coming from a bot. Kudos to them!

Anyway, I'm not a very technical person but, yeah, you're probably correct. The computation is: Transaction Fees = Transaction Size (byte) * Fee Per Byte (sat/byte). Transaction size is affected by outputs (and inputs) such that if your $200 in Bitcoin was received in full, it means it has less UTXO than when it was received in small amounts, say, in $10-$20, which means it has multiple outputs. Needless to say, as the size (byte) increases, the fee (sat/byte) also increases. A transaction size of, say, 1,000 bytes is, of course, more expensive than a transaction which only has 300 bytes.

[hd49728]

Set Custom Bitcoin Transaction Fees | Exodus wallet

Did you try to set custom fee for your Bitcoin transaction with Exodus wallet?

I guess you did not set a custom fee rate and that caused you that very expensive fee. The video is helpful for you to custom the fee rate.

Exodus wallet supports Segwit Bech32 address so you will have cheaper transaction fee than Legacy address.

Check mempools and choose a good fee rate with https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#BTC%20(default%20mempool),24h,weight
Bitcoin Transaction Fees - Everything in one

[joniboini]

You might want to check out consolidating inputs, especially if you regularly make transactions in small value or just make a lot of incoming transactions while rarely making an outgoing ones. There is a good thread that you can follow regularly if you want to get notified if the mempool is free and great for consolidating your inputs here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2848987.0.

[CYBER_COWBOY]

You might want to check out consolidating inputs, especially if you regularly make transactions in small value or just make a lot of incoming transactions while rarely making an outgoing ones. There is a good thread that you can follow regularly if you want to get notified if the mempool is free and great for consolidating your inputs here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2848987.0.

Thank you!

[pooya87]

So basically if you have a BTC wallet and you receive BTC worth of $10 x 20 then you have BTC worth of $200.
If you later want to send them to another wallet, it will cost you more then if you had receive $200 x 1 instead.
Is that correct? I had no idea about it but its very helpful information.

Bitcoin is working with UTXOs or coins instead of using balance (like banks).
It is like cash. Think of UTXOs as physical metal coins. If you received 100x $1 coins, it would be heavy and take a lot of space to carry compared to if you received a single $100 coin which is very easy to carry around.
That's the same with UTXOs, when you received 100x $1 worth of bitcoin payments, you have 100 "coins" to spend. When spending those, your transaction size in bytes would be bigger so you'd have to pay for a much bigger space on the block. Hence the higher fee.

But also the fee rate these days is higher and it is due to an ongoing spam attack against the Bitcoin network. It's 2017 all over again and these spam transactions are artificially filling the blocks making the fees shoot up. The methods they use are very similar too, they jut improved it by finding a way to get other people to spam the network without thinking they are spamming.
The attack will come to an end if the spammers run out of money or the incentive to spam goes away (ie. if the scam market where they are selling Ordinals garbage dies) or if the exploit is fixed to prevent this attack.

[panganib999]

For the most part, Exodus was able to explain the basics of why transaction fees surge upwards in times of high transaction volume. As with the others, I give them props for explaining it to the layman without diluting the technical mumbo-jumbo.

If in any case you're not good with the current fees, AFAIK the wallet/service allows you to set your own transaction fees which will notify you and carry out your transaction once the system detects that the current fees match what you have set. I'm not really a big user of Exodus but with the little google search I made this is what came up. I hope it helps.

This could be a good guide for you: How To Change Bitcoin Fee In Exodus

[serjent05]

Set Custom Bitcoin Transaction Fees | Exodus wallet

Did you try to set custom fee for your Bitcoin transaction with Exodus wallet?

I guess you did not set a custom fee rate and that caused you that very expensive fee. The video is helpful for you to custom the fee rate.

Exodus wallet supports Segwit Bech32 address so you will have cheaper transaction fee than Legacy address.

Check mempools and choose a good fee rate with https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#BTC%20(default%20mempool),24h,weight
Bitcoin Transaction Fees - Everything in one

Setting up a custom fee rate may help trim down the amount needed for transactions but it could bring more problem if it is was trimmed down too low.  We all know that miners ignore too low transaction fees especially when the network is congested. 

Aside from that, the fund of @OP came from different transactions which is the reason why it has a higher fee because the data he needs to transfer is way bigger than a single transaction input data.  And unlucky @OP timed his transfer when the BTC transaction fee is surging because of Bitcoin ordinals inscription.

[CYBER_COWBOY]

It just a bit high that it cost $30 fee to send $100 of BTC just because you made ten different small deposits instead of one big, and I know its high fee´s at the moment + this.
I have actually many times before made small deposits and still never seen anything like this before.
But I am in no rush and I will wait and wait. Money is no problem and I learned a very important and good lesson for the future

[Faisal2202]

And I got a very interesting answer that i had no qlue about and never seen before.
But if its correct its very useful information for those people who dont know about it.

Dear Op, i have never used Exodus wallet in my life, but our post really increase my knowledge because i was not aware of the high fee structure of it and how they take UTXO, actually, i do know a little bit about it but didn't get a chance to make frequent transactions of small amounts because i oftenly transact money. Well, the good side is, now i get to know about it and the most amazing thing was, how did the team supported you with such detailed information even i have not that much of an idea about UTXO but after reading it i get to know more about it now.

And i can see a thread on this fee issue has already been made by loycev which is already shared above by joniboini. Well i also wasn't aware of this thread too. i just didn't understand one thing if anyone could help me here. "the Op deposited 20 TX of let's say 20$-25$ of each and when he deposits them he must have paid the fees and when he tried to withdraw them why he was charged more, (as I know my question makes less sense but I am also admitting I know less about UTXO). Because OP wants to withdraw money which has nothing to do with the transaction per fee (Satoshi/byte fee) because he is making transactions all at once not separately.

[CYBER_COWBOY]

And I got a very interesting answer that i had no qlue about and never seen before.
But if its correct its very useful information for those people who dont know about it.

Dear Op, i have never used Exodus wallet in my life, but our post really increase my knowledge because i was not aware of the high fee structure of it and how they take UTXO, actually, i do know a little bit about it but didn't get a chance to make frequent transactions of small amounts because i oftenly transact money. Well, the good side is, now i get to know about it and the most amazing thing was, how did the team supported you with such detailed information even i have not that much of an idea about UTXO but after reading it i get to know more about it now.

And i can see a thread on this fee issue has already been made by loycev which is already shared above by joniboini. Well i also wasn't aware of this thread too. i just didn't understand one thing if anyone could help me here. "the Op deposited 20 TX of let's say 20$-25$ of each and when he deposits them he must have paid the fees and when he tried to withdraw them why he was charged more, (as I know my question makes less sense but I am also admitting I know less about UTXO). Because OP wants to withdraw money which has nothing to do with the transaction per fee (Satoshi/byte fee) because he is making transactions all at once not separately.

Yes. This was very important and helpful information. 

[franky1]

Therefore, when you have several payouts received, the Bitcoin miners need to do more work to process your transaction. Then, transactions with more data (such as more UTXOs) are more expensive.

miners do not do more or less work no matter what data is in a block.
they simply hash a hash. which is always the same length

whats actually happening is each utxo is a length of data, so if there are multiple utxo that multiplies the length of data.
and the sat/byte cost means you pay more if you are using more bytes

its got nothing to do with miner cost. this about dev political limits implied on the blocksize to limit how many bytes per block

its also when there are spammers paying too much to put their spam transactions into that blockspace. they influence the average sats/per byte

EG
if normal payments were 5sat/byte and a normal tx was 250bytes the fee would be 1250sat
however if half of the block is filled with spam junk paying 90sat per byte even if the byte length is still low. it makes the average tx fee become ~42sat per byte
meaning everyone in future blocks then start needing to pay 42sat/byte average

then of course if you have several utxo's you are trying to spend the tx length becomes much bigger then 250byte average meaning it increases how many sats you need to pay further