So, the other day, I tried to move coins around in preparation for the end of this crypto cycle. As I was moving my LTC from the cold storage (Ledger), I got this notification:
At first, I was a bit confused. There was no way my holdings would constitute as a "large amount" of coins. After all, I was only transferring a part of it to places like Coinbase, et al. Ignoring the warning, I proceeded to send my coins. And then, the transaction failed because it took too long to verify.
From Ledger's own support website, this was a limitation of the device. I had accumulated too many UTXOs over the course of the years.
How? I was foolish enough to use my Ledger as the receiving wallet for all the faucets I used to take part of back in the days. In essence, there were tons of 0.001 LTC transactions into that particular account.
Why does this matter? Some of us may have read about it through our crypto journeys. Here's a helpful article about what a UTXO is and how a blockchain using that model processes transactions. This almost feels like an instance at school when you ask yourself when would you ever need that info. Well, in this case, it's how I came to understand the issue at hand.
In short, I was doing the crypto version of pulling up at the bank with jars of pennies. There were so many UTXOs accumulated in my wallet thanks to the microtransactions. The Ledger device was not capable of counting them all. Even if the hardware wallet had more processing power, at some point, the limit might be due to block size. There were that many tiny transactions.
How to remedy
As suggested on Ledger support website, I had to send smaller transactions. I started off with 1 LTC. Then, 2, and 3, and so on. I repeated this until I was able to send the total amount of coins to the exchange. This winded up looking something like this on Coinbase.
That was quite the learning experience. Note that the issue I encountered here is on the hard wallet's end. This has nothing to do with the capability of UTXO-based crypto assets.
For future reference, if you ever encounter such issue, don't panic. Start sending a little bit at a time. When it comes to safe practice, you should be sending a small amount of crypto to an address before going all in.