Merging my UTXOs into one was an idea that I had had for some time, but that I did not decide to execute. I always told me, later on, I don't need it yet. By chance I found a post by regarding the topic and I decided to try how much it would cost me to send everything I have to another address in my wallet, the result left me worried. At a rate of 25 sats/byte the fee amounted to 0.00035 BTC (around 25 USD in today's prices), simply, for me, too much.
This is because I was accumulating many UTXOs of 30 thousand to 50 thousand satoshis, which, although at the time I thought that minimum was okay to avoid dust, as they accumulated I realized that it was not.
To help you understand better, in Bitcoin on-chain transactions the inputs weigh an average of 158 Bytes each and the outputs weigh 34 Bytes. Therefore, a transfer with one input and one output would have a size of 192 Bytes. The more inputs or outputs you have, the Bytes would have to be added and therefore the fee to pay would increase.
I explain this topic of UTXOs, dust and fees better in a chapter of a book I am working on and I hope one day it will see the light 🤗
So, anticipating that the price of Bitcoin will continue to rise, and I don't want the transfer fee to cost me hundreds of dollars in the future, I decided to unify everything into a single UTXO.
Of course, by setting a rate of 2 sats/byte the transaction took more than 1 day to be included in a block, but I wasn't exactly in a hurry. However, I always feel nervous when I make a transfer in Bitcoin 😅, although everything is fine.
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