up vote 21 down vote favorite
5

What's the minimum transaction with bitcoin - local wallet to local wallet. Can I send for example $20 in bitcoins to another person?

share|improve this question
up vote 18 down vote accepted

You can send any number of bitcoins to anyone, even 1 satoshi (see exceptions below), which is 0.00000001 BTC (about 0.00001031 USD)

However for such small amounts you may not want to include a transaction fee.

There is no minimum transaction fee. However if you send a transaction without any fee you can expect a significant delay in it getting into the blockchain and therefore getting it confirmed. I have tried this recently and it took around 18 hours to get the first confirmation for my transaction. Others have mentioned even higher delays (up to 2 days) in some cases.

It is currently the norm to include a fee of 0.0001 to 0.0005 (approximately 10 to 50 US cents at current exchange rates), resulting in a fairly speedy entry into the blockchain (meaning on average 10 to 20 minutes wait for the first confirmation).

Please note it doesn't make a difference if the transaction happens on the same LAN or even between 2 of your own addresses in the same wallet. If it needs to go on the blockchain the fee should be included unless you are prepared to wait.

So in practice, the smallest amount you want to send is one that makes sense taking into account that fee.

In some circumstances, some bitcoin clients will not even allow you to send a transaction without a fee. This is when your transaction size (in bytes, not the BTC amount being transferred) is over a certain limit. In those cases the client will notify you and ask you to confirm the sending of the fee or cancel the transaction. You can bypass this limit with other clients, but for the same reasons explained above is not something I would recommend.

Finally, to take your example of $20 USD, at current BTC/USD exchange rate of $1034.52 you would simply send 0.01933264 BTC + 0.0001 fee.

Exceptions: As @CoinEnablers mentioned in the comments below, in order to fight transaction spam, some measures have been recently introduced to limit very small transactions (so called "dust" transactions). As far as I'm aware these are not changes to the protocol, but simply new default configurations on both clients and miners' software, that makes it fairly hard to get very small amounts accepted. Currently I believe the minimum value accepted by default is set at 5460 satoshi.

share|improve this answer
5  
You should add information to this answer on the current "dust" threshold of 5300 Satoshi, sending transactions smaller than this will cause most miners to reject the transaction, regardless of fee. – CoinEnablers Dec 3 '13 at 15:23
    
@CoinEnablers good point, thanks. I've added a note on dust transactions. – ktorn Dec 4 '13 at 1:01
    
It is 5430, not 5300 or 5400 Satoshis. – Felipe Micaroni Lalli Sep 24 '14 at 4:18
    
It seems that now the minimal accepted amount is 5460 satoshis. – misko321 Jun 8 '16 at 16:47
up vote 7 down vote

Currently, as of Bitcoin Core 0.14.1 the minimum for outputs is:

5460 Satoshi
54.6 μBTC
0.0546 mBTC
0.00005460 BTC
5460/100000000 BTC
share|improve this answer
    
Current limit is 5460 Satoshi or 0.00005460 BTC – Roman Losev Jun 14 at 10:46
1  
Is this number still valid in 2017? – wilkas Aug 10 at 7:28

protected by Community♦ Jun 15 at 1:05

Thank you for your interest in this question. Because it has attracted low-quality or spam answers that had to be removed, posting an answer now requires 10 reputation on this site (the association bonus does not count).

Would you like to answer one of these unanswered questions instead?

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.