Surely you know more about this than I do, but I'm not so sure. Let's imagine I have 50 inputs of $100. If I merge them all into one input I lose privacy, which is one thing that is said in the OP.
Imho it's about how much you would usually spend at once, because you want to have such tx with one input.
So, if I don't usually spend more than $100, I shouldn't worry about it. What I don't know in the future if I could make a larger expenditure all at once.
On the other hand, you can consolidate anyway to be on the safe side, to avoid getting too easy small inputs later as change from the 100$ inputs when you spend 95$ of them. (and you spend before they become 500$)
I hope I was clear enough, not sure now how to say it better.
Well, with coin control and if I had many small change inputs (like $5) I would be more sure to consolidate them, but consolidate preventively is what I am not clear about, see if someone else helps.
I personally consider it to be a good idea to try to keep track of your transactions, and therefore, you should be ONLY combining like transactions..
so one way to divide them is KYC versus non-KYC... .. and it could be more complicated to divide further, but there could be some kinds of cases that you might decide further kinds of divides, especially if you have some patterns in your own transactions and then you might be able to combine all of the like transactions that might come out of the same source... for example an exchange.. and maybe even some other third party that you deal with if you believe that you are not really given anything up when you combine them. the more rigid you try to be, then the more complicated it might become to try to keep track, but if you largely deal in generic categories, then it might be a little easier to main some kind of a system of keeping separate but then sometimes combining them.. especially if you might have a whole bunch of small ones that you cannot really contemplate spending that way.. but another thing could be that you just leave the small ones alone because you already have some of your UTXOs that you know you would be able to use for larger transactions if such a need were to occur.
if in the next cycle I hypothetically wanted to pay for something worth $2,000 I guess there won't be much difference between 1 and 4 inputs as far as fees are concerned either, no? How do you see it?
I wouldn't count in dollars, but in Bitcoins. And I remember the days in 2017 when each (legacy) input added about 1 m
BTC to the total fee. No matter what the Bitcoin price is, that's a lot, and 1 or 4 inputs would make a huge difference.
My take: It's a lot like cash money: $5 is convenient to buy a coffee, but it gets annoying already to pay for groceries for the week. Paying with a $10,000 bill would raise questions, and I wouldn't want the barista to know I own those ancient bills. So a bit of everything works for me.
Disclaimer: I've never seen a $10,000 bill. I do own a $10 bill though.I remember quite a few bitcoiners back in the day (let's say 2014-2016) who used to sometimes consider having 1BTC as too small of an increment, so some of them were separating their coins into 10 BTC increments.. so surely that can become a problem. because even now 0.3 BTC is very close to a $10k bill.
Maybe some of those guys fixed their issues, but I have my doubts because some members do not want to be moving their coins around very much, so surely some of them might be getting into situations in which they would prefer to have some UTXOs with smaller amounts in them.
I have a "friend" who tends to rotate through various addresses, so even an address that has something like 0.3 BTC might end up getting used up over a year or two... that is if the goal might at one time be to exhaust certain UTXOs, but let's say this friend has several BIGGER transactions of $2k to $4k, and then he might have 30 different UTXos that have 0.3 BTC each, so instead of exhausting a couple of the UTXOs, he does the next 10 transactions from each of 10 of those UTXOs and then ends up having around 0.2 BTC in each of those 10 UTXOs that used to have 0.3 BTC... .but then he still has another 20 UTXos that have 0.3 BTC each... does not even sound like a first-world problem, but it does sound like it could be a problem for some bitcoin OGs.
That's going to be fun!
