Some time ago, I installed a bitcoin wallet, and I tried receiving bitcoins from many faucets (BitVisitor, cointube and similar ones); now, I have 1 btc and something; I tried spending it, with no success (I got "invalid transaction"). I figured it might have been a problem in my client, so I exported all the keys and build an account on blockchain.info: when I tried spending bitcoin from here, I got the error:
"This wallet contains a very large number of unspent outputs. Please consolidate some outputs"
What should I do? I read about "dusty" transactions, but I cannot discard them, because all of my bitcoin are made of it; blockchain reported an available sum of 1/3rd of the total: I tried sending it to another wallet, but it made things worse, because now the availabe sum is 1/10th of the total.
So you made a transaction? Can post the TX ID?
The "sweep keys" didn't work, too.
didnt work as in...?
Is there any solution to use these bitcoins?
Yes, but its hard to give advice after you tried 500 different approaches and I have no idea what the current state is.
I.E., is there a way to "force" a transaction with no fees at all (I don't care if it needs days to complete)?
Yes, but thats not smart in your case.
Or... is there some service that takes the private keys, "extracts" coins and send them back in a clean transaction?
Sure its possible that someone could do that for you.
Sorry if my question is silly, but I haven't found anything useful on the web (I found similar questions, but most answers were useless attempts to guess, like "I never tried, but...", or "I don't know, but I believe that....").
Thanks for your help.
Thank me (and the others that might chime in) when its over.
The problem with faucets - as you are experiencing now - is that they tend to send you small amounts. The way bitcoin works is that a transaction refers to a formerly received transaction. There is no balance. If you received 10 transactions of 10k satoshi in the past and now want to spend them all your transaction has to refer to every single one of those 10 transactions. This makes the transaction big (in size). An input needs ~180 byte. You also want to send the btc somewhere, thus you need at least one output, which needs ~34 bytes and then there is a bit more than needs ~10 bytes. Thus your 100k satoshi TX needs ~1844 bytes. The "proper" fee for this would be 20k satoshi or ~20% of the amount you spend.
So much for how transactions work and why small inputs are a problem. How do you solve this? You pay a high(!) fee. If you still have bitcoin core:
#1 update to the latest version (
0.10.0) and make sure its fully synced.
#2 Enable
coin control Settings -> Options -> Wallet -> check Enabled coin control features -> ok.
#3 check how many inputs you have and their combined balance:
Send -> Inputs -> (un)select all
In the top of the window there will be
Quantity,
Amount, Bytes and more. Post these information here, this will help us to understand how bad your situation is.
Do not forget to post the TX ID of the transaction you created via other wallet/services (if any).