Can I lower fees with stratagy

Question

Say I have two accounts in my wallet. Account A has one address, account B though has 5 address. Each address in account B has a dust amount of coin in it. If I were to use the rpc 'move' command, moving each piece of dust from the respective address in account B over to one lump in account A

Accounts, exist only within the Bitcoin Core client. They are just a bookkeeping device to group your funds. You can move coins between accounts with the move command in the Bitcoin Core console. This updates the client's internal records to adjust the balances of those accounts, but doesn't actually cause any coins to move between addresses, so it has no fee.

How is that valid, as account A would have the one primary address? Does this mean that I am sending to another account owned by me so the coin dust is landing in the account ignoring the primary address?

And say for example I then used the lump in account A to buy some new boots. Wouldn't that make the next fee that account A would pay higher as it was made from a collection of dust(s)?

Would I have to wait a considerable amount of time to lower the fee? Is there another strategy I could use to bring the fee down? Like importing an external key from an compressed pubkey from another wallet (C), paying to to C from A. I don't yet fully understand public keys and compression but as I understand sending to them is considerably cheaper (something to do with inputs?.. not too sure what exactly those are)

I feel sort of like I am understanding more, can someone please clarify a little and/or correct me?

Edit-1

What if I wait a while then as Tim S suggests... Account B has 5 addresses, lets look at one of them (an address with piece of dust in it). Lets say that some more dust payments were sent to that address making the 'dust pile' grow.

At what point is it not dusty? Are there still too many inputs?

(Am I confused by the term 'inputs': "inputs from many addresses in your wallet" or "inputs from many payments to the one address")

Say I waited 3 days after all the dust came in and settled until it gained priority, then sent the whole dust pile (from that account B address only) to another address. Would it be more worth sending / have I made the situation better?

Answer 1

Regardless of what accounts they are in in your wallet, consolidating/spending your dust may require substantial transaction fees - maybe even exceeding the value of the dust. The major factor that comes into play is the size added to a transaction by each additional input. You can read a lot of info on the Bitcoin wiki about transaction fees.

Here are some strategies for reducing/eliminating the fees:

• Include some dust in a free transaction. How much you'll be able to include without lowering your priority below the minimum for a free transaction depends on the coin-age you're spending in the transaction (large, old balance = high priority).
• Include some dust in a paid transaction. The 0.0001 BTC per thousand bytes means that if you have a transaction that's only, say, 250 bytes you can add up to 750 bytes of extra data (in this case, dust inputs) for no additional cost.
• Transmit your transactions directly to a free transaction relay/low-fee pool. For example, Eligius only requires 0.1 TBC (0.00004096 BTC) per 512 bytes.
• Wait it out. If the value of a bitcoin rises substantially, the transaction fee limits will likely be lowered to account for that, so your dust will not be so dusty-looking.

If these all sound like a bit of a pain, that's because Bitcoin isn't really designed for micro-transactions, and much is in place to discourage spamming in the form of "dust".