Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: Bitcoin transaction fees
by
mocacinno
on 02/06/2016, 11:34:46 UTC
I often send small amount of Bitcoin around 100,000 satoshi, is there a way to avoid paying a fee that is a significant proportion of the amount sent?

depends...
the recommanded fees depend on a couple of factors:
- the number of inputs used to create outputs
- the number of outputs
- the age of the inputs
- how long you're willing to wait (on average) to get added to a block

both the number of inputs and outputs make up the transaction size, the bigger the transaction size, the more fees will generally be needed. The size has nothing to do with the ammount of coins you're trying to send!!! it can be cheaper to send 100 BTC in a transaction with 1 input and 1 output than sending 0.00001 btc in a transaction with 10 inputs and one output.

basically,
if you try to use a minimal ammount of inputs and create a minimal ammount of outputs with inputs that were untouched for a couple of months, and you're willing to wait several hours to get included into a block (on average), you can add substantially less fees than when you're using a massive ammount of inputs that were just recently added to create a large ammount of outputs, and you want a reasonably chance of getting added to the next block.

One quick fix would be to let the coins age for a while, and try to generate multiple outputs in one transaction... This way, the single transaction will have a larger size, but the size will probably be smaller than the combined size of the individual transactions you otherwise would have made