So I have seen a few people sending bitcoins without any miner fees, and their amount eventually got sent back after a week or so.
Thats bc.i specific behaviour, coins dont "get send" back usually.
So, what do you think the technique(or tips) for sending bitcoins without miner fees would be? This would be really helpful for sending small amounts less than BTC0.001 since the transaction fee would be more than 10% of the real amount transferred.
Inputs of 1 Bitcoin with 144 confirmations (~1 day) typically have a high enough priority to be used in a transaction with a single output to be confirmed in a reasonable amount of time. Thus if you want to spend 0.001, just wait 1000 days, pay the fee or use an off chain system like changetip.
Uhhh... Say I was sending 10 BTC, am I going to only wait 1/10 of a day?
~14.4 blocks, yes its linear.
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what if a wallet contains many small (~5k sat) payouts. how long will it take for them to have high enough priority?
last time i sent some of these coins to an exchange and it had low priority while i had 0.0001 fee included.
the coins were at least a week in my wallet before sending.
Every input has to mature on its own. The more inputs you use the bigger the transaction gets and the higher the priority has to be in order to get away without fee. Keep in mind that miners typically only reserve 50 kbyte in a block for TX without fee. A fee must also be high enough in comparison to the size in bytes. The typical rule of thumb is 10k satoshi per every 1000 bytes. Thus if your transaction is bigger than 1000 byte the fee would be 0.0002 after this rule. Its not perfect, but its a pretty good estimate.
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in total 8 faucet payouts and 3 normal (less than 0.01) received transactions.
it took over 10 blocks to get a single confirmation while the fee was 0.0001.
Payouts from faucets are a different beast because they are typically very small. I recently helped[1] someone with >2000 inputs and total amount of ~0.5 BTC from faucets. It took some years to gather that much and I had to pay ~0.01 BTC in fees to move the coins. It also took several seperate transactions. This might sound odd, but the best way to spend funds from faucets is to combine them with bigger inputs.
E.g. if you have an input of 1 BTC that is confirmed for 1 day (or longer) and an input of 1 satoshi you can use both and send them to yourself. The next day you take the big input with another small input, etc. This will take some time, but it would allow you to fuse all inputs into a single big one over time without the need to pay a fee.
[1]
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=970041.msg10603746#msg10603746