Bitcoin ATM and wallet transfer fees equaling around 50% of my deposit

[actiondigital]

I used a bitcoin atm for the first time, it said there would be 1 dollar fee, no 'tos' to sign in addition, nothing.  They took about 70 dollars, or it went somewhere on two deposits of 100 and 200 dollars, leaving me with a balance of 2.162.. mBTC.  Now I'm in the electrum wallet and it's telling me that to send my bitcoin to my other wallet it will be another .5 mBTC, another fifty to sixty bucks.  I'm fit to be tied about this situation.  I've tried several times at different times of the day, always the same.  I tried to import my recov phrase in to phantom so I could use the crypto somewhere and the phrase doesn't work.

Thanks

Ivan

[bitbollo]

What is the issue / complaint? You cannot access anymore to your balance? You paid too much fees? You don't know how to properly set transaction fees?
70 dollars where fees... described in what manner?
Its impossible transaction fees but maybe these are just "spread" fees - difference between the price they "sell and buy"?
with electrum you can adjust the fees. https://bitcoinelectrum.com/how-to-manually-set-transaction-fees/ (if you like its plenty of guides outside).
I don't know what is it a "recovery phrase" if you mean the electrum seed, I would avoid to paste in any online tool...

[Charles-Tim]

Electrum seed phrase is not BIP39 seed phrase, but you will be able to import it on wallet like Bluewallet. But that is not necessary because Electrum (and other reputated oncustodial wallet) charges no fee but the fee is given to miners for including your transaction into a block.

You can customize the fee on Electrum to a lower rate. Right now the mempool is not congested since some months ago to the extent that 1 sat/vbyte transaction will later get confirmed although the fee right now is 5 sat/vbyte for fast confirmation.

Hope you do not have many UTXOs? This could be the cause of it or you are mistakenly increasing the fee to such a huge amount.

[Findingnemo]

I used a bitcoin atm for the first time, it said there would be 1 dollar fee, no 'tos' to sign in addition, nothing.  They took about 70 dollars, or it went somewhere on two deposits of 100 and 200 dollars, leaving me with a balance of 2.162.. mBTC.  Now I'm in the electrum wallet and it's telling me that to send my bitcoin to my other wallet it will be another .5 mBTC, another fifty to sixty bucks.  I'm fit to be tied about this situation.  I've tried several times at different times of the day, always the same.  I tried to import my recov phrase in to phantom so I could use the crypto somewhere and the phrase doesn't work.

Thanks

Ivan

Are you sure that it is an actual, legitimate bitcoin ATM?

It won't ask you to spend more bitcoin to credit your bitcoin back to your wallet and whenever a platform pulls this stunt is a plain old scam.

Or do I misunderstand any part? Are you complaining that you received less than what you expected? if yes, then there will be a transfer fee on top of the trading fee which depends on the ATM that you used but it's not going to be a huge sum as 70 dollars.

[odolvlobo]

...Now I'm in the electrum wallet and it's telling me that to send my bitcoin to my other wallet it will be another .5 mBTC, another fifty to sixty bucks.  I'm fit to be tied about this situation.  I've tried several times at different times of the day, always the same.

50000 sats for a transaction seems excessive considering that mempool.space is recommending only 3 sats/vb right now. What is the fee rate that Electrum is suggesting?

Have you received bitcoin in many small amounts? Keep in mind that the fee depends on the rate and roughly the number of inputs to the transaction. The number of inputs is generally the number of incoming transactions that are needed to fund the transaction. For example, if you received your bitcoin in 100 transactions, it would cost about 100 times as much to send that bitcoin as it would if you received it all in a single transaction.

If this is the case, then you can use an advanced feature called "coin control" to exclude the small inputs from your transaction in order to lower the number of inputs.

... I tried to import my recov phrase in to phantom so I could use the crypto somewhere and the phrase doesn't work.

This is a different problem. Hopefully, @Charles-Tim is correct in that you set up your Electrum wallet wth their default recovery phrase type, which is not compatible with BIP-39.

Regardless, the cost is probably not due to the wallet software. Often, the fee rate recommendation is a little off, but you can always set it manually if you want.

[hosemary]

Now I'm in the electrum wallet and it's telling me that to send my bitcoin to my other wallet it will be another .5 mBTC, another fifty to sixty bucks.  I'm fit to be tied about this situation.  

Are you using a 2FA wallet in electrum?

The fees are not high now and you should be able to make very cheap transactions, but if you want to make a transaction from a 2FA wallet in electrum, you have to pay an extra fee to trustedcoin.
If my guess is correct, the best thing you can do is to disable 2FA using your seed phrase.

[khaled0111]

Do you mind sharing more information to help us better understand what happened, like:
- Did you use the ATM to buy or to sell bitcoin?
- Do you mind sharing the transaction IDs? (don’t do it if you value your privacy)
- Are you sure the ATM charges a fixed fee of $1? This seems weird because, afaik, those machines usually charge really high fees (up to 20% of the transaction value)

You don’t need to import your seed into a different wallet as Electrum allows fee customization. But are you using a 2FA wallet by any chance (because 0.0005btc is the fee you need to pay to trustedcoin in advance for every 20 transaction you send)?

[Hatchy]

Now I'm in the electrum wallet and it's telling me that to send my bitcoin to my other wallet it will be another .5 mBTC, another fifty to sixty bucks.  I'm fit to be tied about this situation.  

Are you using a 2FA wallet in electrum?
If my guess is correct, the best thing you can do is to disable 2FA using your seed phrase.

Just so incase he doesn't know how to disable the 2fa, op you have to reimport your seedphrase into Electrum and click on the disable 2fa. Then you can run your transaction without paying to trusted coins. Also you should try checking the memepool space for the current fee rate, so you don't just select any fee, and end up wasting too much on fees. The current fee is at least 1sat/vb - 5sat/vb
Chcek https://mempool.space/

[nc50lc]

I used a bitcoin atm for the first time, it said there would be 1 dollar fee, no 'tos' to sign in addition, nothing.  They took about 70 dollars, or it went somewhere on two deposits of 100 and 200 dollars, leaving me with a balance of 2.162.. mBTC.

Are you or the ATM using USD fiat currency or other "Dollar"?
Because the BTC amount you've received is closer to $300 if bought with Brunei Dollar.

You account's local time (actiondigital profile) doesn't seem to be within USA nor Brunei's current time though.

Now I'm in the electrum wallet and it's telling me that to send my bitcoin to my other wallet it will be another .5 mBTC, another fifty to sixty bucks.

If it's shown as another output with blue highlight: it's what they've mentioned: Trusted Coin's 2FA fee (trustedcoin.com/#/faq#fees)

Here's a refresher on what was displayed when you created the wallet (same on android):

Read the third paragraph to send it without their service and fee at a cost of less security, quite dangerous in case your machine isn't secure.
They should've been more specific on the "small fee" there though.

[hd49728]

If it's shown as another output with blue highlight: it's what they've mentioned: Trusted Coin's 2FA fee (trustedcoin.com/#/faq#fees)

Read the third paragraph to send it without their service and fee at a cost of less security, quite dangerous in case your machine isn't secure.
They should've been more specific on the "small fee" there though.

More details about Trustedcoin 2FA fee.
https://api.trustedcoin.com/#/faq

How much does a 2FA wallet cost?

TrustedCoin's service is not free. Every 20 outgoing transactions (starting with your first outgoing transaction), TrustedCoin will charge a BTC-denominated cosigning fee. This fee is shared with the developers of Electrum and appears as an extra output on your outgoing transaction.

By clicking on the TrustedCoin shield icon in the lower right of the Electrum interface, you can configure to pay in batches of 100 transactions instead of 20. Batches of 100 end up being cheaper if you do more than 50 outgoing transactions from your wallet. Here is the current fee table:

Batch size   Per transaction price   Batch price
Pay every 20 transactions:   0.000025 BTC/tx   0.0005 BTC total
Pay every 100 transactions:   0.0000125 BTC/tx   0.00125 BTC total

TrustedCoin previously supported paying on a per-transaction (as opposed to batch) basis but had to discontinue support for this due to escalating network fees. Note that fee rates are usually halved every time BTC doubles in value.

If you disable 2FA (an option available when you restore your wallet from seed), then you will not be charged a cosigning fee.

Disable 2FA and use a normal (non-2FA Electrum wallet) is better in transaction fee. Above posts already have guides on how to disable 2FA for OP.

[nc50lc]

-snip-
They should've been more specific on the "small fee" there though.

More details about Trustedcoin 2FA fee.

I'm aware of the cost of Trusted Coin's 2FA service.
That was about the note in the 2fa wallet setup that didn't specify the exact amount which newbies may think that it's still cheap like when they put that message there.