Topic: Why am I receiving a negative? - electrum (Read 488 times)

It's confusing when you're just starting out, but in reality you shouldn't focus on addresses... It doesn't matter if you derive 10.000 addresses from an xpub or just 50.
What's important is the amount of unspent outputs that are funding the addresses generated by your wallet. As soon as you want to spend those unspent output's you'll have to create a new transaction. The fee you'll have to pay to convince a miner to put your transaction in the block he/she is trying to solve depends on the size of the transaction (not the value).

Why? Because the size of the block is limited. A miner doesn't care if the value of the transaction is huge or very small, he just wants to optimize the sum of the fees of all transactions he can fit into the limited blockspace.
If you want your transaction confirmed, you'll have to make sure your fee (in satoshi per byte of transaction data) is within the top 1 Mb of transactions in the mempool... The fee needed for a fast confirmation fluctuates over time, so at times of low feerates, it makes sense to combine unspent outputs, so the fee you'll have to pay at times of high feerates is lower...

Since segwit, the blocks can be up to 4Mb in size, but the last 3Mb can only be filled with witness data, so don't worry about this untill you've mastered the rest of the protocol first (it'll only make things more confusing if you start reading about this first).

The size of your transaction increases with the number of unspent outputs you use an input and the number of new unspent outputs that'll be generated by your transaction.

So, in the end, things like hot wallet, cold wallet, number of addresses,... It doesn't matter... Your fee will depend on the type of wallet, the number of inputs and the number of outputs. It's a good idear not to create unnecessary transactions, and it might also be a good idear not to receive dust payments... If you're going to receive dust, try out the lightning network, switch to an altcoin or try to sell credit to your users in bigger chunks instead of accepting micro-payments.

Here's a neat tool to emulate the fee you'll have to pay when spending your unspent outputs:
https://coinb.in/#fees

It has nothing to do with "addresses"... It is all about "inputs".

If you create a transaction that spends 5 inputs from 1 address:
address1-input1
address1-input2
address1-input3
address1-input4
address1-input5

That is the same as spending 1 input from 5 different addresses (in one transaction):
address1-input1
address2-input1
address3-input1
address4-input1
address5-input1


In both instances, you are including 5 inputs. What the previous poster was suggesting is that you consolidate the deposits to your "cold storage"... IE.

address1-deposit1 --|
address2-deposit1   |
address3-deposit1   |--> coldStorageAddess-deposit1
address4-deposit1   |
address5-deposit1 --|

That way, when you want to spend from cold storage, you'd only need to spend 1 input, instead of 5.

As a side note, this is why a lot of exchanges and crypto service providers have set "minimum deposit" amounts... To avoid having to deal with lots and lots of tiny inputs that cost extra fees when they try to spend them.

It was once possible to send with a profit. Now the bitcoin news seem to only cRe about the big guy who can afford 1 sat per byte fees.

The decentralised currency is no longer that.

Other currencies exist that are fee free (but they’re not very stable to the bitcoin price so I’d advise against using them).

Broadcasting a transaction is essentially broadcasting a signed transaction yes. You have to broadcast it because otherwise it’d just sit on your computer...

And I’d advise against doing it your way. It’s probably cheaper fee wise to use a cold wallet and send money to it and then have a secondary hot wallet for allowing people to withdraw funds.

I bet your number 2 is the answer for binance. may I do follow up question,  when user pay more than x amount, it will broadcast. what is broadcast mean? is broadcast means to sign transaction to send btc to new wallet/address?

is online wallet same meaning to hotwallet ?

If so, will this be the flow of your said example?:


what I did now is almost the same:


so user withdrawal will use the same wallet that user deposit.

but the other guy in this thread say its better to move all to cold wallet like this



side note, I honestly thought bitcoin are like paper money. if you collect $1 from million people, you can spend 1million.

but in bitcoin if you collect 0.00001 from a million people, you cannot spend 10 bitcoin, you can only like spend maybe 50% of it or maybe you cant spend at all.
(because I made some test with 0.00001, it will cost like 225byte times 10sat = 2250 satoshi to send out 0.00001)

1. Yes it'll be more efficient fee wise.
2. No. They get you to send to an online wallet:
1. If the payment is say more than 0.01BTC a transaction is automatically broadcast to move the coins to cold storage.
2. If it's 0.01BTC or less then it'll store the input in a list ready to broadcast a transaction once enough funds are in that wallet to make it worth moving (say 0.05BTC).

I have seen sites send no fee transactions with dust and just hope they'll confirm at some point.

Some sites like you to message them first if you send high amounts to them so they can give you an address on their cold storage (its normally for 50BTC+ transactions though).

Which mean, channel all deposit to my cold wallet (ledger nano for example)

but by using my ledger nano's xpub in my server to receive deposit, which mean there will be 10,000 addresses too, sending from here to a hot wallet for example will cost me huge fees too right?

*anyway is that how exchangers like binance do? channel all deposit to cold wallet first and sign for hot wallet later?

Yes. But instead of sending a transaction (to your cold wallet) every time you receive coins in your hot wallet, you can:

a. Receive them directly in your cold wallet and consolidate the funds from time to time with a low fee (making all inputs become just one that can be spent in the future).
b. Wait until you get a few transactions and send all of your coins to your cold wallet with just one big transaction (e.g: instead of 10 transactions of 1 input - resulting in 10 outputs -, you can do 1 transaction of 10 inputs - resulting in just 1 output).

I have a question, let say I have 10,000 users.

each on of them deposit to my wallet (xpub generate 10,000 address for each user for deposit)

After receiving their bitcoin, I will instantly forward it to my cold wallet.

If I want to send from my cold wallet to one address, is that mean my output will be 10,000 addresses, and I will need to pay huge fees?

It would even have been better to never use the 10k sat at all. What OP did was throw away 10k sat to turn 20k sat into 14k sat.
I've seen much worse when fees were very high: some wallets send dust when it would be cheaper to exclude the dust.

I call it wasting...

It’s one input to another input as far as I can tell so it is quite a wasteful thing to do.

The percentage will remain high since the minimum fee you can now send is 1 sat per byte and everyone just seems to be going along with that (for some reason). There’s probably a better chance of just leaving the coins there and hoping they’ll become valuable some day and you will get your bitcoin at more than 86% of the value you’re trying to send.

Edit: ok it’s two inputs to one output but it’s still pretty wasteful.

I wouldn't necessarily call that wasting.

In case of fees rising again to a multiple of the current fees, his UTXO's would have been worthless.
But now he still can use them with higher fees, since it is only one UTXO now.

Actually the only way to be able to use such small UTXO's is to consolidate them when fees are low, even though the percentage paid in fees is quite high :7

That is just blockchain.com's "guess" at how much BTC was actually sent from the "sender" to the "receiver" (excluding fees)

As the "sender" and the "receiver" are the same in this transaction (ie. from Address: 1PBbL...GNuPs to Address: 1PBbL...GNuPs), then they are saying that NO BTC was actually sent from PersonA to PersonB... which is correct. All that happened was you spent inputs totalling 0.00003000 BTC from 1PBbL...GNuPs, paid a fee of 0.00001600 BTC and received 0.00001400 BTC back to 1PBbL...GNuPs).

Essentially, you just wasted 0.00001600 BTC.

The estimated BTC transacted is zero because you sent those bitcoins to yourself (the same address). You have combined two inputs into one which is a good thing to do when the transaction fees are low but you did it accidentally with only two out of ten transactions which you have received. Here you can see it more clearly.

here it is https://www.blockchain.com/btc/tx/c05e6d83a7891c997f906666ecb512f8448df7f2c2940f1a2001ea61b6fd6533

what makes me more confuse is, estimated btc transacted is zero.

can you post the txid with the -0.000016 amount?
I just want to make sure that my previous post is correct on the situation
it was based on the assumption that you are sending all utxo back to your own wallet

It means that someone has sent you 0.000001 BTC multiple times and you have sent 0.0000016 BTC once. It looks like you haven't used Electrum a lot. Take at Electrum tutorials which I wrote for beginners and advanced users.

Don't forget that you will pay a lot in the future for a transaction if you decide to send everything from your wallet to a different address. Every 0.000001 BTC transaction is a separate input which will increase the size of the transaction. Learn more about it here. It might be a bit confusing for you at the beginning, focus on Electrum first.

my head is spinning really fast now. 

@tutanxy yes but create a new thread for any further questions

i don't know if is ok to ask here. is ok if i choose standard wallet after i installed electrum?

the outgoing transaction is for 0.000016 not 0.00001. those 0.00001 transactions are incoming ones.

I would say costly to use it. one utxo input worth 100-150 sats in a transaction
to send that 0.00001 (= 1000 satoshi) from segwit address to another single segwit address,
will cost you (at 1s/byte) around 144 satoshi... that's 14% of total amount transacted

look at your transaction, to consolidate 11 utxo of total 0.00011 you paid 0.000016
sent 11,000 sats and received 9,400 sats, 1600/11000 = 14.5% in fee

No, your friend can still 'use' it but doing something like that is wasting your time & money. You might as well make 1 transaction with 0.001 amount rather than spending 0.00001 for 100 times. Dust transaction is a transaction with low values and fees, which will probably take a very long time to get confirmed (or probably never, depends on the network status). CMIIW.

what? you mean if I sent 0.00001 100 times to my friend, it will be useless?

It means you made a transaction yourself, sending funds to someone else.

Collecting dust amounts of Bitcoin is quite useless, I recommend you read https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/aug-2022-mempool-empty-use-this-opportunity-to-consolidate-your-small-inputs-2848987.

As per the picuture. Can somebody explain to me?