Cold wallet UTXO question \ stacker news ~bitcoin

514 sats \ 5 comments \ @Maximus 19 Sep 2023 bitcoin

I’ve not transacted on Bitcoin much at all and I’m nervous about getting hit by a gotcha with UTXOs when I decide to move the contents of a cold storage wallet.

I funded it originally with 2 transactions from Coinbase (KYCed but don’t care) and it has been sitting there ever since.

Recently there was the news about a big player messing up their UTXO and accidentally giving half a million worth of BTC to a miner (who later refunded it).

Question is how does a novice avoid something like this happening when even the big players can get stung by it? Do most wallet apps handle all this for you? And what is the best strategy for the cold wallet. I might want to empty it in a single transaction to a new wallet or back to an exchange, or just move part of it. I want to avoid this mistake and avoid being left with unusable dust.

Thanks 🙏

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304 sats \ 1 reply \ @DarthCoin 19 Sep 2023

Just use Sparrow or Electrum and you are perfectly fine.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @nerd2ninja 19 Sep 2023

DarthCoin got you your answer, but to be more specific, use something with "coin control" (which the wallets Darth mentioned have)

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @elvismercury 19 Sep 2023

Wallets are pretty good about this now, and lots of redundancy and sanity-checking is built in, e.g., Coldcard will yell at you if your fee is too high, which is not so much about the fee itself, vs. you screwing up the tx somehow, often by manually dicking around with the change address bc you don't understand how btc transactions work. This used to happen all the time in the old days.

Point is, use good tools, don't screw around with stuff you don't deeply understand, and you'll be fine.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Maximus OP 21 Sep 2023

Just to say thanks for everyone’s replies (and sats), feeling a little less nervous about it but as it’s my main stack I guess I’ll there’s inevitably going to be some anxiety when it does finally come time to move it. Anyway keep stacking, big up the stacker.news and Lightning community 👍

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @tenderscore 19 Sep 2023

This isn't a concern. Coin control of UTXOs is a specific thing that you have to manually do with wallets that support it. Wallets automate all of this unless you go into settings and tell them not to.