Input from community on transfer fees

[MNster]

Hi all, newbie to the forums here. 
I've been in Crypto for four years, but I've recently seen the light on BTC.
(wish it had been sooner!)
Anyhow, here's my dilema: I've been slowly accumulating Satoshis this year, and I also bought a cold storage wallet recently.  I tried today to move a small amount of BTC to the wallet as a "test" transaction to insure it went to the designated wallet, but the fee was a lot of money in my opinion.

Should I just send everything and hope it gets there?
Or wait until the fees go down (will they go down? I'm using CDC as the custodial exchange atm.)
Normally, I always do a test transfer on new wallets, but the fee is almost the same amount I bought this week!..
Any thoughts?
Thanks in advance for your thoughts & ideas....

[OmegaStarScream]

The fees are not really that high right now as you can see here[1]. The main problem here is the transaction size that is too big because you've been receiving multiple small amounts throughout the year.

EDIT: missed the exchange part. Very a few exchanges have dynamic fees. If you're been using a custodial exchange wallet, then it probably doesn't matter. The fees are going to remain the same

[1] https://mempool.space/

[BitMaxz]

What exactly is the CDC exchange you mean?
If the satoshis you that you collected and received it to some exchanges the fees when withdrawing it from the exchange are high sample on Binance the current fee for withdrawing BTC on Binance is around 0.001BTC in segwit network so that's too expensive.

So you don't have a choice but to hold it there or to exchange it to altcoin to be able to withdraw it with lesser fee.

[mk4]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but you're trying to move BTC from a centralized exchange to your cold storage, yes?

If so, some centralized exchanges simply have their withdrawal fees set too high unnecessarily; that, or you're balance is simply small. If that's the case, you're probably better off waiting for your BTC balance to increase a bit to make the withdrawal more worth it.

(and probably complain via customer support if they overcharge tx fees.)

What exactly is the CDC exchange you mean?

I assume it's Crypto Dot Com.

[Odohu]

Hi all, newbie to the forums here. 
I've been in Crypto for four years, but I've recently seen the light on BTC.
(wish it had been sooner!)
Anyhow, here's my dilema: I've been slowly accumulating Satoshis this year, and I also bought a cold storage wallet recently.  I tried today to move a small amount of BTC to the wallet as a "test" transaction to insure it went to the designated wallet, but the fee was a lot of money in my opinion.

Should I just send everything and hope it gets there?
Or wait until the fees go down (will they go down? I'm using CDC as the custodial exchange atm.)
Normally, I always do a test transfer on new wallets, but the fee is almost the same amount I bought this week!..
Any thoughts?
Thanks in advance for your thoughts & ideas...

The transaction fee at the moment is one of the best we have seen in recent times. If you have been around during the time that the mempool was congested due to the Ordinal attack, you would have been happy seeing the fee as lows as it is now. So, I wouldn't want you to continue waiting and hoping that the fee will come down because it is already down.

Since it is the first transaction to the wallet, I think it is better you send small amount to test if everything work smoothly before you send the rest BTC. This will save you the pain of realising you made a mistake in any of the stages. If you are using CEX to collect your Bitcoin, you can withdraw monthly or thereabout instead of regularly, this will help you reduce the fees.

[MNster]

Thank you to everyone who has responded so far.
You all have made interesting points.  Like mk4 pointed out, I think the problem is I have a small amount of BTC and the exchange rates are unreasonably high, so a fifty dollar fee stings a bit, just to move currency that I ALREADY PAID FOR ONCE.

Yes, Bitmaz, I meant Crypto dot com.  I cannot wait to get away from these infernal CEXes!
I really need to learn how to buy from a non-KYC source.

[tranthidung]

Anyhow, here's my dilema: I've been slowly accumulating Satoshis this year, and I also bought a cold storage wallet recently.  I tried today to move a small amount of BTC to the wallet as a "test" transaction to insure it went to the designated wallet, but the fee was a lot of money in my opinion.

Slowly accumulating satoshis this year, does it mean you do multiple purchases, not only one?

It's good that you can spend money to buy a cold storage wallet but this is strange that you can not spend some money for transaction fee.

Cold storage wallet is good but if you can not have more money for it, you can use free wallet software, open source like Electrum wallet. You can set it up as single signature wallet or multi signature wallet, free.

Transaction fee now is cheaper than weeks or months ago and gives you good time for practice with on-chain transactions, pay fee.

If you have been accumulating bitcoin since start of 2024, you would have known about some worse times with more expensive transaction fee last 5 months.
https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#BTC,6m,weight

[jrrsparkles]

Yes, Bitmaz, I meant Crypto dot com.  I cannot wait to get away from these infernal CEXes!
I really need to learn how to buy from a non-KYC source.

P2P is the best way if you want to avoid paying huge withdrawal fee especially when the amount you are trying to withdraw is small.

https://kycnot.me/ is place where you can find all the available options to convert fiat to crypto or vice versa and crypto to crypto without going through any KYC process. You may have to pay higher fee than the market fee depends on which fiat that you are using to buy crypto.

[MNster]

Anyhow, here's my dilema: I've been slowly accumulating Satoshis this year, and I also bought a cold storage wallet recently.  I tried today to move a small amount of BTC to the wallet as a "test" transaction to insure it went to the designated wallet, but the fee was a lot of money in my opinion.

Slowly accumulating satoshis this year, does it mean you do multiple purchases, not only one?

It's good that you can spend money to buy a cold storage wallet but this is strange that you can not spend some money for transaction fee.

Cold storage wallet is good but if you can not have more money for it, you can use free wallet software, open source like Electrum wallet. You can set it up as single signature wallet or multi signature wallet, free.

Transaction fee now is cheaper than weeks or months ago and gives you good time for practice with on-chain transactions, pay fee.

If you have been accumulating bitcoin since start of 2024, you would have known about some worse times with more expensive transaction fee last 5 months.
https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#BTC,6m,weight

Yes, I buy small amounts of Satoshis every week when I get paid.
Usually between 10-30K Sats.
I can afford the fee, but I find it unreasonably high.  
For example, this week I only bought 10K Sats, which cost me around 70 USD$,
but the fee for my "test" transaction is 6K Sats....so the majority of what I bought will now be lost. 😞

[Charles-Tim]

Yes, Bitmaz, I meant Crypto dot com.  I cannot wait to get away from these infernal CEXes!
I really need to learn how to buy from a non-KYC source.

If you can use OKX, you can convert the coin to coins like Algo and send it to OKX. Convert it back to bitcoin on OKX and withdraw. The transaction fee on OKX for bitcoin right now is less than $7 which is better than $50 on the exchange that you mentioned. What you see on exchanges are just a representation of your coins and not your coins, but the withdrawal fee for bitcoin on exchanges can be exorbitantly high.

[Hatchy]

Should I just send everything and hope it gets there?
Or wait until the fees go down (will they go down? I'm using CDC as the custodial exchange atm.)
Normally, I always do a test transfer on new wallets, but the fee is almost the same amount I bought this week!..
Any thoughts?

If I can remember correctly, centralized exchanges usually have a fixed fee for their BTC transactions. So since you clearly have little coins to move, I'll suggest you keep accumulating till you have a reasonable amount of coins be for moving to your cold storage. Also, you can try registering on some other exchanges that requires less fees for BTC transactions. Then to move your coins over them, you might have to convert your Bitcoins to some other coins like usdt and move using less fee first before finally moving it to your cold wallet.

[God bless u]

Hi all, newbie to the forums here. 
I've been in Crypto for four years, but I've recently seen the light on BTC.
(wish it had been sooner!)
Anyhow, here's my dilema: I've been slowly accumulating Satoshis this year, and I also bought a cold storage wallet recently.  I tried today to move a small amount of BTC to the wallet as a "test" transaction to insure it went to the designated wallet, but the fee was a lot of money in my opinion.

Should I just send everything and hope it gets there?
Or wait until the fees go down (will they go down? I'm using CDC as the custodial exchange atm.)
Normally, I always do a test transfer on new wallets, but the fee is almost the same amount I bought this week!..
Any thoughts?
Thanks in advance for your thoughts & ideas....

Yes they know all the techniques of people storing their money in cold storage that's why they have taken advantage of them and their fees have been raised up. They think that people are very much dependent on them that's why they have a mover advantage.

They're right to some extent and we can't do much about that. Let's hope for the market to get better so that we can pay them what they want easily.

[khaled0111]

Yes, I buy small amounts of Satoshis every week when I get paid.
Usually between 10-30K Sats.
I can afford the fee, but I find it unreasonably high.  
For example, this week I only bought 10K Sats, which cost me around 70 USD$,
but the fee for my "test" transaction is 6K Sats

You should follow Charles-Tim suggestion since it's the cheapest way to move your coins from the exchange to your cod wallet.
After doing that, you better buy bitcoin less frequently. So, instead of buying 20k sats every week, you can buy 40k bi-weekly.
This way you will reduce the number of UTXOs on your wallet and this will save you some fee when you need to spend your coins.
Also, don't forget to consolidate your inputs whenever the chance arises.

[Saint-loup]

If your cold wallet accepts other cryptocurrencies the easiest way is to change your Bitcoins for a crypto with lower transaction fees. Unfortunately Bitcoin is pretty expensive for transactions fees, and I hope I'm wrong but it is very unlikely to change in the next few years IMO. So you are very likely to undergo the same issue each time with this cryptocurrency. Unfortunately it's not anymore a crypto designed for small transactions unfortunately, except in cases where LN is available, and you're able to use it, though.

[Knight Hider]

For example, this week I only bought 10K Sats, which cost me around 70 USD$,

I hope you bought 100K Sats for that price, not 10K.

[Mate2237]

Op transaction fee right now is very low and if you are having high transaction fee the you are using a new wallet that have not done anything before or you have done only few transactions. This have been happening to me for yes past and now the transaction fee in my wallet is okay. And this the present transaction fee.

With this amount of the transaction fee, you don't have to complain but if your transaction fee is higher than this then you have only done few transactions in the wallet.

[khaled0111]

With this amount of the transaction fee, you don't have to complain but if your transaction fee is higher than this then you have only done few transactions in the wallet.

Sorry, I didn't get this! How can the number of transactions he has made affect transaction fees? Did you mean he might have many unspent outputs? In that case, the more UTXOs (more received transactions) the higher the fees not the opposite.
Anyways, OP obviously is trying to withdraw his coins from a centralized exchange not from his own non-custodial wallet and that's why he is being charged with such high fees.

[tabas]

but the fee for my "test" transaction is 6K Sats....so the majority of what I bought will now be lost. 😞

That sucks, what if you accumulate and save all of those money and buy like every week or whenever you have that bigger money? The fee fluctuates from $0.9 - $1+ nowadays and I think that won't makes sense if you're going to do a test transfer because for sure those accumulated sats of yours will be put into fees. It is just crazy that most of the centralized exchanges withdrawal fee are based still on BTC and not with $$ so the suggestion about converting it to other altcoins first makes sense and revert/convert it back to BTC.

[Zaguru12]

P2P is the best way if you want to avoid paying huge withdrawal fee especially when the amount you are trying to withdraw is small.

https://kycnot.me/ is place where you can find all the available options to convert fiat to crypto or vice versa and crypto to crypto without going through any KYC process. You may have to pay higher fee than the market fee depends on which fiat that you are using to buy crypto.

I don’t think P2P can help here, OP is trying to move funds from a centralized exchange to his custodial wallet. If he does P2P on an exchange he might still need to pay transaction fee for the bitcoin to be moved to his wallet. The reason why OP seeks a decentralized exchange is because there transfer charges of withdrawal charges are usually small compared to the centralized exchanges. OP should simply use exchanges that charges lower and move his funds out of the exchange.

With this amount of the transaction fee, you don't have to complain but if your transaction fee is higher than this then you have only done few transactions in the wallet.

I don’t understand this better but I think you might have misunderstood the question here, OP is seeking a lower withdrawal charge exchange at the moment. Transaction fee on exchanges do not in anyway havd to do how many transactions you have made, they fix a withdrawal charges using some criterias and that’s all

[MNster]

P2P is the best way if you want to avoid paying huge withdrawal fee especially when the amount you are trying to withdraw is small.

https://kycnot.me/ is place where you can find all the available options to convert fiat to crypto or vice versa and crypto to crypto without going through any KYC process. You may have to pay higher fee than the market fee depends on which fiat that you are using to buy crypto.

I don’t think P2P can help here, OP is trying to move funds from a centralized exchange to his custodial wallet. If he does P2P on an exchange he might still need to pay transaction fee for the bitcoin to be moved to his wallet. The reason why OP seeks a decentralized exchange is because there transfer charges of withdrawal charges are usually small compared to the centralized exchanges. OP should simply use exchanges that charges lower and move his funds out of the exchange.

With this amount of the transaction fee, you don't have to complain but if your transaction fee is higher than this then you have only done few transactions in the wallet.

I don’t understand this better but I think you might have misunderstood the question here, OP is seeking a lower withdrawal charge exchange at the moment. Transaction fee on exchanges do not in anyway havd to do how many transactions you have made, they fix a withdrawal charges using some criterias and that’s all

This!
(thanks tho to everyone who left their thoughts and/or advice anyway, a lot of good points were made, and I now have a lot to consider moving forward.)

As far as UTXOs go, that's a paradigm I don't quite understand yet.
I thought I was doing a good thing by buying Sats whenever I got paid, but now some are telling me that is a bad thing.  This is worrisome.  
And 'Consolidating Inputs' ...I have no idea what that is.
I guess I truly am a newbie when it comes to BTC  *facepalm*

For example, this week I only bought 10K Sats, which cost me around 70 USD$,

I hope you bought 100K Sats for that price, not 10K.

Show me where to buy 100K Sats for 70usd, and I will go there right now.