How to Sweep Bitcoin Dust to a Single Wallet Address with Electrum by Mario Dian Jun 03, 2017 · 4 min read If you are the type of "Bitcoiner" that gets involved with Bitcoin faucets, online games and so on, the chances are your wallet is full of low-valued outputs.These outputs that each hold small amounts of satoshis (few hundreds to thousands) are called Bitcoin dust.These days, dust outputs are worth less than an average transaction fee paid to miners.Transactions that need to be confirmed ASAP have thus become increasingly more expensive - more so with dust included.That's because transaction fee is based on data size in bytes, instead of transaction's nominal value in BTC.In other words, the more inputs and outputs the transaction has, the more expensive it becomes.There is a trick to lower a future transaction cost, though.It requires you to sweep dust to your own address for a very low fee every time circumstances allow it.Huh?The idea is simple.Find a day when there aren't more than say 30 000 unconfirmed transactions in Mempool.

Usually, that would be on weekends when the network is not that busy.Look up the average recommended fee and lowball it by at least 50% (or any value you're comfortable with).The lower the fee, the more time it takes for the transaction to be confirmed.Use the low fee to spend dust outputs to another address in your possession.Note: Because you're sending bitcoins to yourself, it doesn't matter that the confirmation time is a few hours or even days.Let's consider the following example: We want to make a transaction of 2 BTC to Bob using an average fee of 200 sat/B.However, 10 dust outputs (0.001 BTC each) need to be included in the transaction because we only have 1.993 BTC on a "non-dust" address.Payment to Bob (TXa1) A regular transaction including dust to Bob would look as follows: 2.003 BTC)1500 bytes2 BTCinputsfee)0.003 BTC Instead of making a very large and expensive transaction, let's split it in two (TXb1 and TXb2).Dust outputs swept to a single output (TXb1) In this transaction, we'll use a very low fee of 50 sat/B because it doesn't have to be confirmed ASAP.0.01 BTC)1400 bytes0.0093 BTC0.0007 BTCThis transaction should be sent a long time before a regular payment needs to be sent!

Payment to Bob (TXb2) This transaction is a final payment to Bob with dust already settled within a single output.We'll use the current fee of 200 satoshis per byte, now.armory bitcoin tor2.0023 BTC)373 bytes2.001554 BTC0.000746 BTCAs you can see, instead of paying the fee of 0.003 BTC for a single TXa1, combining TXb1 and TXb2 costs only 0.001446 BTC.How to sweep dust For the purpose of this tutorial, I'll be using Electrum wallet on Mac OS X.Any wallet that lets you construct custom transactions and spend from certain addresses is good, though.litecoin hardware errorsDownload Electrum Open your wallet and go to the list of addresses.Find addresses with a small balance on it (I only had one low-value address so I used all my available addresses instead).Hold CMD (I believe it's Ctrl on Windows/Linux) and select addresses you want to spend from.Right click one of the addresses and select "Spend from".You will be taken to "Send" screen of the wallet.However, click the "Receive" tab first to get a receiving wallet address where the dust will be swept to.Copy the address and go back to the "Send" screen.Here you see how the transaction will be constructed, what the value and the fee will be etc.Past the receiving address in the "Pay to" field and move the "Fee" slider to the left to get the lowest fee rate.Also, make sure "Replaceable" is selected in case average transaction fees suddenly rise and you will have to replace the transaction.Click "Preview" and look for the transaction size in bytes.litecoin hardware errors

In our case, it's 488 bytes.Now go to bitcoinfees.21.co to check current fee rates and confirmation times.Look at the "Delay" and "Time" rows to figure the acceptable confirmation time.We don't need our transaction to be confirmed immediately so let's say 61-80 satoshis per byte is fine.Go back to the wallet and multiply the transaction size with a fee from the above interval.bitcoin bug bountyLet it be 62 satoshis per byte:4886230256The correct total fee amount is thus 0.00030256 BTC.Go back to your wallet and paste the above value in the "Fee" field.Click the "Max" button to readjust the maximum amount that will be spent and click "Preview".Check transaction details and if it looks right, click "Sign".If your wallet is password-protected (highly recommended) you will be prompt to sign the transaction with your password.After signing the transaction, click "Broadcast" and the transaction will be distributed across the network.Go to the "History" screen and have a look at the sent transaction.Because bitcoins were spent within the same wallet, the final amount is only shown as the transaction fee of 0.00030256 BTC, not the whole transacted amount of 0.082 BTC.Remember to only sweep dust when Mempool's backlog is not that long and fees are lower.Otherwise, you might end up paying a couple of dollars depending on how many inputs are included in your transactions.I hope you find this tutorial helpful.good wife bitcoin episode

Please let me know in the comments below if you have any questions or feedback.If you my post, don't forget to share it with your followers.bitcoin gospelYou can also support me by donating some bitcoins.Subscribe to our newsletter for weekly thoughts and tutorials.You'll receive a FREE e-book as a bonus!The Bitcoin frenzy appears to be fading.But an upstart exchange made a big bet last week that the virtual currency still held promise as an investment.The exchange, SecondMarket, which is based in New York, nearly swept the government’s latest Bitcoin auction, winning 48,000 of the 50,000 Bitcoins for sale.The exchange’s syndicate, which received 104 bids from eight parties, won 19 of the auction’s 20 Bitcoin blocks.“Obviously, we’re very thrilled with the results,” said Brendan O’Connor, the managing director of trading at SecondMarket.SecondMarket was started in 2004 by Barry E. Silbert, who runs the Bitcoin Investment Trust investment fund.

The venture capitalist Timothy C. Draper, who won all of the nearly 30,000 Bitcoins in the United States Marshals Service’s first auction in June, said last Friday that he had won only 2,000 Bitcoins in last week’s auction.Draper bid on behalf of his venture firm, Draper Associates.The Marshals Service confirmed on Tuesday that SecondMarket had won 48,000 Bitcoins and that the transfer of the coins was completed on Monday.The auction last Thursday of 50,000 Bitcoins, worth about $19 million, was the second by the Marshals Service for Bitcoins seized in connection with Silk Road, the defunct online bazaar.In June, it sold nearly 30,000 Bitcoins seized from Silk Road, which was shut down in October 2013 after the authorities said it was an online marketplace for illegal drugs and other illicit activities.A number of other prominent Bitcoin players, including Pantera Capital and Mirror, previously called Vaurum, also participated in last week’s auction.Still, the latest sale raised questions about whether the appetite for Bitcoin among investors was subsiding.

The Marshals Service said last week that only 11 bidders participated in Thursday’s auction, a sharp decrease from the first auction, when 45 bidders took part.The service received 27 unique bids this time, compared with 63 in June.And at the time of the second auction, Bitcoin was trading at about $370, down from its peak of about $1,150 a year ago and about $200 below its price at the start of the first auction in June, according to CoinDesk’s Bitcoin Price Index.It was trading just below $350 on Tuesday morning.“The demand is starting to dry up,” said David L. Yermack, a professor of finance at New York University’s Stern School of Business.“I think a lot of the excitement may have bled out of investors.” Bitcoin’s wild price fluctuations, which analysts had said were driven partly by speculative trading, have all but disappeared in recent months.This price stability, in turn, might have further discouraged opportunistic, short-term investors from participating in the auction, Mr.

Others in the Bitcoin industry, however, dismissed the notion that the virtual currency was no longer an attractive investment.Instead, they said, the fact that fewer bidders participated in the second auction was a sign that the Bitcoin market was becoming more liquid.“Volumes have picked up, so there are other ways to get larger trades relatively easily,” said Garrick Hileman, an economic historian at the London School of Economics who studies alternative currencies.“The Bitcoin market has matured.” The government’s two auctions represent only a small portion of the total amount of Bitcoins seized in connection with Silk Road.The government has recovered 173,991 Bitcoins, including 144,336 found on computer hardware belonging to Ross Ulbricht, who is said to have created Silk Road.Lynzey Donahue, a spokeswoman for the Marshals Service, said by email at the time the second auction was announced that the agency anticipated selling the remaining Bitcoins “in the coming months,” but that “no exact dates have been determined.” The promise of at least one more auction, however, has some in the Bitcoin industry worried.