Topic: removing small deposits from your wallet (Read 4864 times)

Here is how I was able to remove all but 5 Satoshis from my wallet using the standard client.

I had a wallet with 0.0005 bitcoins that I could not spend because the required fee to spend it all was more than the balance.

I added 230 btc to the wallet 5 days ago. I was prepared to leave these in the wallet for a long as necessary to allow me to spend it all.  But my wife watches the bitcoin prices ($42 at the moment) and she insist that I sell most of my coins now.

I subtract 0.0125 from my balance and send it to another wallet. TX 63ffefdf348ff68bced90e3cda45c1e6115e71c44ad3f8d3adfd4270f37077ac
Then I do an iterative process of trying to send all my coins.

balance = 0.0125, send 0.0125 -->balance too high after fee. Can't send
send 0.00000001 --> 0.0005 fee needed, resulting balance  = 0.01249999, too much left don't send.
send 0.0005 --> 0.012 fee needed, resulting balance = 0.0.  Sounds good but client says it isn't enough!  Possible bug?
send 0.00049 --> 0.012 fee needed, resulting balance = 0.00001. Better. Don't send.
send 0.000499 --> 0.012 fee needed, resulting balance = 0.000001. Even better.
Keep repeating untill: send 0.00049995, resulting balance = 0.00000005.  This is the best I can do.  Hit send TX 3c51d3f8965d0bee5b647c9f3f2d8b4d85d7593fd70156af7f516e1c0982f04f

End result: I have a wallet with 5 satoshis.  It cost me 0.0235001 bitcoins ($0.99) to create.

I will never gamble again.

You don't want to receive payments less than .0005 in general, but you might find payments as low as .00010001 useful.  

A hard fork will help the figure be even smaller but there is talk about lowering it before any hard fork happens.  

There is an option of waiting, maybe with time these transactions will be more valuable and the fee will be lower.  That will make spending these transactions more valuable/possible.  

Depends on what you are asking.

SatoshiDice sends 0.00000001 BTC transactions all the time, but I think they pay a 0.001 BTC fee to do so.

If you want the Bitcoin-Qt wallet to let you try to send the transaction without a fee (note: miners still may not confirm it for you), the transaction has to meet three conditions:

• All outputs must be larger than 0.01 BTC.
• The size of the transaction must be less than 10,000 bytes.
• The priority of the transaction must be higher than 57,600,000 (works out to about 1 BTC day)

As seen here:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transaction_fees

It is dynamic problem. Currently smallest possible transaction is very low, because feeless transactions are allowed to block chain. However the fees will rise as bitcoin becomes more popular, so will the smallest usable transaction.

I don't think that is an urgent problem at all to bitcoin. And I don't recommend trying to solve the problem by arguing on the internet forums, or spamming the developers. There are lots of alternative cryptocurrencies, it is best to try developing those if you are interested in microtransactions. Bitcoin itself doesn't need to be usable for those IMHO, at least urgently.

So what is the smallest usable transaction that is possible with bitcoin?

Can this figure be made smaller or is that a hard fork problem?

Bitcoin doesn't work with microtransactions, deal with it. Essentially low enough transactions have negative value, because it costs more to use them than they have value. Or maybe now you will get some transactions done for free, but soon that won't be the case any more. So the "free bitcoins" site are actually "free spam" sites - great concept!

Of course you can leave them to your wallet and try to use them slowly alongside regular transactions.

ignore - good luck.

WELL all is can say is whatever you think you know you are WRONG
I've been work on this problem that you say is NOT there for 2 days now
and regardless of what you contend I have been charged 1 BTC to transfer 1 BTC to MtGox
with bitcoin-Qt.  I still have .2BTC bit coin-QT does not want to know about

you have provide NO real help - you continue to comment with No real help
I'm sorry I let you aggravate me into a Shouting fest
yes I wanted help - too bad you have NOT provided any

Sorry, I though you wanted help.  I hadn't realized that you were just a troll looking to shout at and insult people.  I assure you I am not clueless.  I understand exactly what your problem is and how to resolve it.  If you want to find someone who is clueless, you may want to try looking in another direction.  I'll tell you what, edit your post and remove your insult and I'll continue to help you.  Leave your post the way it is and you are going on ignore and I'll leave you to cry in your spilled milk for as long as you like.


This is not true.  Please don't confuse the Newbies with lies such as this.


Then why exactly did you say, "fees per kb are based on $50or$10/btc prices NOT $45./btc"?

That depends on how many pieces they are and how small they are.  The fee is 0.0005 per KB.  There is no such thing as a 1 BTC fee requirement.  Once again you are lying and confusing newbies.  I think that the largest required fee that you can encounter is 0.1 BTC.

yo clueless

bitcoin-qt WILL NOT transfer micro bits for any FEE
I DON'T care when the rates were set
1 bitcoin to get 1 bit coin of micro peices to sale is "WAT TOO HIGH"

This may take care of your rawxfer problem.

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/yet-another-coin-control-release-closed-144331

To prevent spam, the protocol of anyone running the reference code (or anything that matches the behavior of the reference code) refuses to relay low priority transactions (and many miners won't include them in a block) without a minimum fee.  Most of the wallets don't have "coin control", or the ability to choose which inputs to use in a transaction, so it is difficult to consolidate small inputs into a single larger input before they become overwhelming.


I suppose it depends on what you mean by "transfer", but generally no.  That is the problem he is having is that he can't send them without a significant fee.


The plan is to increase the minimum fee as the exchange value of bitcoins increases.  It was last changed in June 2011 when the exchange value had climbed from $10 to over $30.  I suspect it will need to get up near $300 per BTC before the fee gets changed again.

What sort of problem?  As long as you include an adequate fee, it doesn't seem to have any problem at all.


The fees per kb were chosen in June 2011.  At that time the value of 1 BTC had very rapidly risen from $10 to over $30 as seen on this chart bitcoin:

http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg60zczsg2011-06-01zeg2011-06-09ztgSzm1g10zm2g25

I see this a 2 fold problem
1.  bitcoin-qt has a problem handling micro payments
2.  the fees per kb are based on $50or$10/btc prices NOT $45./btc and even then we WAY high

just a quick question which probably isn't going to help the OP directly.  

Is this problem due to the wallet design or is it due to the way that the block is designed?

Would it be possible to transfer them all to one new wallet without paying a fee?

The reason I'm asking is that while these micro payments are a pain now, if the value keeps going up as expected, these tiny payments are going to be worth something and could well become the usual value people have in their wallets - unless the wallets can't handle such small values - best find a solution now before it becomes a major issue!

as I said earlier raw xfer is the way

can anyone just point me to he rawxfer app

RESTATING the obvious is another very helpfull comment   
NOT !!!

I know what caused the problem SOWHAT

this thread is about how to correct it

Your scrounging for tons of "free coin" sites are basically the same as satoshi dice dust spam and is the reason you've having these problems.

You're effectively picking up pennies from the ground for years and then plunking down a big bucket of loose change and wondering why it's difficult to spend your money.

Your choices are limited and all of them will probably require paying a significant transaction fee to consolidate your dust. Or you could just print out your wallet keys and put it in a safe place for another time and create a whole new wallet.

As has already been pointed out, there are only 2 financially reasonable ways combine all that dust into a single output:

You can either learn how to create raw transactions, send a single large value transaction to the wallet, and then use raw transactions to repeatedly sweep up the dust until it's all gone.

Or

You can import all the private keys to MtGox.  Let them take care of sweeping the addresses into their combined wallet, and then send a single transaction back to your wallet at the same value as the total of all the dust.

Since MtGox does not pay transaction fees when sweeping bitcoins from an imported private key, it may take a long time for some of the swept bitcoins to confirm.