I'm trying to migrate away from my Multibit Classic wallet. Recommendations I've read say to setup a new wallet with other software (I'm trying Electrum) and then send the BTC to the new address. I've got about 0.95 BTC.
It's not been easy because the transaction fee in Multibit Classic is set too low, so I've had to get the private key to my wallet into Electrum (either sweep or additional wallet). This has been complicated because Electrum doesn't like the format of the key from Multibit Classic so I've had to find a website to decode it.
I am now in a position to send the BTC, but when I preview the transaction, I see my transaction fee is 0.08BTC - that's around $300! It would seem it's because the transaction size is large, as I collected by BTC through altcoin mining a couple of years ago, so there are lots of source transactions (141) which makes my transaction around 22KB. Would that sound right? See below.
Can this be right? I can't believe I'm being charged $300 in transaction fees! Please help!
If you are not going to spend all your coins, you don't need to move them. Just import all private keys to Electrum or other trusted wallet and spend your coins as you need. If you want to deal with dust, you can sort your coins by their amounts and send the smallest ones with some low fee to your new address, to "melt" them into new bigger coin. On August first there was an opportunity to send any transaction with 1000 satoshi fee, because the mempool was empty.
$300 in transaction fees is ridiculously too high. I dont care how many inputs are there. Personally I am on pause in BTC transaction, until this mess is sorted.
Transaction fees are measured in bitcoins per bytes, because everyone is competing for space in bytes in the next block. You could put hundreds of inputs and outputs to effectively push hundreds of transactions into just one. Transactions are not equal, so they need to be priced differently to have a healthy payment system.