I first got into Bitcoin through the free faucets. I opened my Copay wallet and was ready to get started. I decided to generate a new Bitcoin address for each faucet. I figured it would be easier to track where the money was coming from. The payments started coming in, 10,000 satoshis here and 20,000 satoshis there. I also signed up for some cloud mining contracts, and small payments were coming in daily. Faucets are a good way to get a feel for Bitcoin, it helps prep you for thinking in decimal points. Currently 20,000 satoshis or 0.00020000 BTC is worth $.26 USD or 26 cents. After about 3 months, I got up to $100 USD worth of BTC. I was hooked, free money and watching it go up in value was exciting.
Initially, I was just going to hold my BTC in my Copay wallet. I started buying Bitcoins in larger amounts. I sent it directly to the exchange and invested in alt-coins. I started to see big gains on my investments, so I got more Bitcoin to make more investments. The fees seemed reasonable on those transactions. I decided to use my balance on my Copay wallet. I selected max amount and was shocked by the fees. I then changed the Bitcoin Network Fee Policy in Settings to Super Economy. I tried sending out about $20 USD worth of BTC, and the fees were around $1.5-2.50 range. I did this a few times more, as the fees seemed reasonable. I am currently trying to withdraw the max amount out of my Copay wallet. I currently have .039449 BTC in the wallet. The fees settings is at Super Economy. I get a message of ".016934 BTC will be deducted for bitcoin networking fees." That is $22.65 USD fee to send $29.61 USD! I don't really want to lose that amount to a fee. The later half of the message says, " A total of 0.00084 BTC were excluded. These funds come from UTXOs smaller than the network fee provided." UTXO is geek-speak for “unspent transaction output.” Unspent transaction outputs are important because fully validating nodes use them to figure out whether or not transactions are valid– all inputs to a transaction must be in the UTXO database for it to be valid. Is this .00084 UTXO just gone and can never be recovered? I'm guessing all the different wallet addresses with lots of small micro payments is why I'm getting this message. From my understanding the blockchain is a record of all transactions that ever occurred with BTC. I'm confused why this small amount costs so much to send, when larger chunks of BTC around $200 USD worth costs less in fees to send. Is this a problem with the Copay wallet or a BTC miner's fee problem?
I'm aware of the news of Bitcoin possibly doing a future hard fork or a soft fork. Talk of adopting SegWit could be possible and we are waiting to see how it works with Litecoin's recent adoption of it. Future changes in how Bitcoin operates, could fix my current problem. I love Bitcoin, but this high fee is kind of a turn off for me. If this isn't fixed, then it makes more sense to just use other coins with much lower fees to send money.
Did I do something wrong?
Is the UTXO causing this?
Is this a Copay wallet error?
Should I wait it out and hope Bitcoin fixes the fee structure?
Should I just suck it up and take the hit on the fees?
Should I add more bitcoin to the wallet and send it out, hoping the larger amounts pull some of the micro payments out with it?