Topic: Mempool empty: Remember to consolidate your coins into a single address (Read 129 times)

That's a great topic by Loyce. I didn't knew that Electrum would allow you to use Coin Control-like features. I guess it will be easier for people to get their private keys in Electrum and make all the transactions on there rather than having to download the entire blockchain, even if I don't really like SPV wallets but that's for another thread. I guess it's a cool way to do it temporarily and safe enough. You consolidate your coins into single addresses with Electrum, then you can eventually download the entire blockchain and send them into a wallet.dat for cold storage (or a hardware wallet if you use that). It's just that most interfaces i've seen suck compared to Coin Control from Bitcoin QT.
Even if by then the mempool starts getting filled again, the fee will be waaay cheaper due less inputs.

I confess im too lazy and still haven't done it. Im just waiting for 0.16 to be released.

Also indeed, faucets are a nightmare if you got any that way. Or just any miner that hats hundreds of mining rewards from back then when you could mine and actually get rewards. I saw a wallet with tons and tons of payments. The resulting fee of a such a transaction would be a pain.
But I think the most relatable case for most of us is having being in here for years participating in signature campaigns and having tons of small payments, then you try to spend it and the fee is huge if the mempool is filled.

With all the inane and pointless threads we tend to get in this forum, the ones containing useful advice like this should really stay somewhere near the top and not drift down to page 8 without a single reply.  If anyone used faucets in the past, you may well have dozens, or perhaps even hundreds of "dust" inputs piled up in an old address somewhere.  Now you can turn them into something you might actually be able to spend.  Take advantage of this time.  It may not last.  

If anyone needs help understanding the process, there's another thread here in the technical support forum.

Look at this and rejoice:

https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#1,30d

The mempool is looking pretty empty right now. Transactions are CHEAP and pretty fast. It would be a good idea to get all of your coins into a single address (of course, use "Coin Control" or any other equivalent in your wallet and do due diligence privacy-wise)

Why do this? example: You have a business and get payments in a Bitcoin address, you will have a ton of small payments if what you sell is cheap stuff, and assuming your business is successful, you'll have many inputs.

Other examples include receiving donations, or being part of a signature campaign. You'll have a bunch of weekly payments if you've been here for years, so if you wanted to move that now, it would be way cheaper than doing it a couple of weeks ago when blocks were full. In fact it would have been a disaster doing a transaction with many inputs back then, the fee would have been insane. Now you can get all these payments and put them together for cheap.

Unfortunately, fees will come back when organic traffic + spammers (Ver, Wu, etc) come back. The problem of receiving many payments and then later on wanting to do a transaction consisting of all these inputs being a resulting very expensive transaction will always be there, I think even with segwit, years of tons of payments worth into a single transaction will always be a very expensive move, so take advantage of times like this to save money, since sooner or later you would want to move your coins.