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How to Send Bitcoin
General Wallet Use
To send Bitcoin, you enter the recipient's address and the amount in your digital wallet; to receive Bitcoin, you provide your wallet address to the sender.
This guide will simplify these steps, making the process straightforward and easy to understand—from using popular wallets like Leather to choosing the right transaction fee.
How to Send Bitcoin
The first step in sending Bitcoin is to download a Bitcoin wallet like Leather. Once you have deposited Bitcoin into your wallet, you must then retrieve the recipient's address.
If you are sending a friend Bitcoin you can ask them for their wallet address, or if you are depositing to an exchange you can follow their instructions to send to receive the deposit address.
Once you have the address of the person you want to send to you can open your wallet app and paste their address into the recipient field. Then, you must choose a fee setting depending on how fast you want the transaction to be completed.
After that, all you have to do is click send and the transaction is on its way. To track the status of the transaction you can use a block explorer. This gives you a view into every transaction on the Bitcoin network, allowing you to track whether your transactions made it to the recipient.
How Do I Send and Receive Bitcoin Instantly?
The Bitcoin network is designed to maximize security and decentralization, and as such transactions on the network can take a long time. To get around this wait, scaling solutions like Stacks offer lower-cost and near instant transactions.
Compared to the slow and secure transactions on Bitcoin mainnet, Bitcoin L2s like Stacks offer users the flexibility to sacrifice security for speed and lower costs.
How to send bitcoin to another wallet
Sending Bitcoin to another wallet is a relatively straightforward process. First, a user will open their wallet app, like Leather and sign in.
Next, a user will ask the person they are sending Bitcoin to for their wallet address. This address will be copied and pasted into the Leather app. It is critical this is the correct Bitcoin address as Bitcoin sent to the wrong Bitcoin address cannot be retrieved.
How Long Does Bitcoin Take to Send?
Generally speaking, the blockchain network is designed to create a new block around every 10 minutes.
With this in mind, if a user sets their network fee to “high” they could get a transaction included in the next block, which should be mined in 10 minutes or less. But, there is a caveat.
This means a high value transaction can take anywhere from 10 minutes to over an hour to be considered confirmed by some merchants or institutions.
Many entities don’t consider a transaction final until it has received multiple confirmations, or said another way, until multiple blocks have been mined. This is usually done for high value transactions, and oftentimes entities will wait for 6 or more confirmations before considering a transaction final.
What is the Bitcoin Network Fee?
The Bitcoin network fee is a small amount of Bitcoin that users will pay to get their transactions included on the blockchain. The fee is given to miners in exchange for the work they do to process and include transactions in blocks they mine.
These fees help to reduce spam on the network and make sure that transactions are prioritized properly. Paying a higher relative fee at any given time ensures that your transaction will be prioritized before others.
How Do I Set the BTC Network Fee in Leather?
Setting the BTC network fee in Leather is simplified thanks to the Leather wallet interface. When a user is going to send a transaction, Leather will give users the option to pick from Low, Standard, High or Custom fee amounts.
Leather wallet will programmatically calculate what each option charges based on the current state of demand to transact on the Bitcoin network.
For example, if a user chose to set the fee amount to “high”, this means that the amount paid would correspond to the higher percentile of fees paid for a transaction on the network at that time.
What happens if I set the fee too low?
Most often, a user will have to wait until congestion on the network subsides and miners begin to prioritize lower fee transactions.
Another consequence of setting the fee to low is your transaction getting stuck. Essentially what this means is that Bitcoin nodes dropped your transaction from the mempool because it took too long to be included. A user can then simply re-initiate the transaction with a higher fee.
In some scenarios, if you enabled replace-by-fee (RBF) you can resend the transaction with a higher fee to get the transaction included by miners.
Costs of Sending Bitcoin
The costs of sending Bitcoin can vary depending on the congestion on the network at any given time. Generally speaking, as there is a greater demand to transact on the network from users the fees to do so will increase and vice versa.
Oftentimes Bitcoin wallets help to abstract some of the guessing when it comes to including fees with your transactions. For example, the Leather wallet lets users configure transaction fees based on the following options: Low, Standard, High and Custom.
Users then have the flexibility to choose the option that works best for them depending on their budget and urgency.
Why is There a Bitcoin Network Fee?
The main reason for Bitcoin network fees are to incentivize miners to process and validate transactions on the blockchain. These tips cover the costs miners spend on computational resources and energy to include transactions in the blocks they mine.
Additionally, by charging network fees it helps to keep the blockchain free of spam and abuse. By charging to transact on the network it discourages malicious actors or bots to spam the network with unnecessary transactions.
Overall, these fees work to maintain the network’s security and integrity, enabling it to function as one of the world’s most decentralized and reliable systems to transact on.