I recently made a large bitcoin purchase and was hit with a 1.0 BTC transaction fee.
I've read all the posts about "dust inputs" and "coin age" etc etc, but it all seems like so much technical jargon when all you want to do is make a transaction.
Is there any good practice for consolidating your coin in/outputs?
Lets say you have a wallet with 100 btc. At least with the standard client, you have no idea what that's really comprised of, or how many of those are old enough to be sent without a fee.
Is there a way to mop up the dust beforehand? Instead of having to find out they're too scattered at the time you need to send a payment.
It depends on how important your anonymity is to you.
The reference client doesn't have any coin control built into it, so there isn't a good way to keep track of your outputs and choose which to use for various transactions.
If anonymity isn't too important to you, you can send your entire balance to yourself after each transaction. This would ensure that your entire balance is one single output (to be used as an input in the next transaction). With 100 BTC in the wallet, the coins would only need to age about 15 minutes after each transaction before consolidating again to avoid the fee.
