I sent about 10.4 QCN to Poloniex yesterday as a test -- so verify I could transfer the coins properly, basically. Unfortunately, all has not gone well and while their support apparently looked into things and credited one of the deposits, the other six are still missing. Wait, seven deposits? Oh, yeah... I couldn't send one bigger transaction due to the old "too many inputs" problem. So I split it up into seven transactions (I just pressed the up arrow to repeat the last command, though I did generate a new payment ID after the first transfer). Here's the list of commands I used in the wallet:
I think it is risky to change the payment id while payments are still to be processed, are you sure Poloniex can handle that? They may only store one payment id per account/coin. Also, I wouldn't use an exchange transfer to cleanup dust, those transfers take longer and it just makes everything harder to track. Such a large transaction for such a small amount could sit around for a while before being included in a block, and may eventually be rejected and returned to your wallet.
I clean up small inputs by sending the coins back to the same wallet first, or a second wallet used for spending (the first used only for mining). Don't mine for pools where you are a tiny fraction of the pool hash (<1%), find a pool more suitable for your hash rate, until the pools have sorted out a solution for the dust problem.
Mining for pools where you are more than 1% can be rather difficult, and despite all the talk of decentralization it's actually provably less profitable to mine at a small pool than at a large pool. If it's not, then why doesn't everyone just stick with solo mining forever? Because you'll likely never find a single block that way, just like a small pool will only find blocks infrequently. A pool with 3% of the hash rate for example is likely to find about 2.7% of blocks in my experience, while a pool with 1% might only find 0.5% of the blocks. And a pool with 35% of the hash rate might find 37% of blocks. But that's a topic for discussion elsewhere.
I'm mining a decent amount of coins right now, which is of course generating tons of small payouts over time. What's the best way to consolidate those so I can do one or two larger transfers to an exchange? Do I just run:
transfer 0 [My Address] [Amount]
And do that multiple times until I can send larger transactions of 10 to 100 coins without having the wallet balk about having too many inputs? I guess I'd have to wait for confirmation on the transfers as well, but better than than ending up with vaporized coins. LOL