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With network fees so low at the moment, I've seen a lot of recommendations to take the opportunity to move funds to segwit addresses and consolidate your UTXO set. During peak congestion, many smaller UTXOs were simply not economical to spend and this is likely to occur again in the future. However I haven't found a definitive guide on how to actually do this.

I'm using the Ledger Nano S Bitcoin wallet, which doesn't provide the most granular control over software tradeoffs but not the most abstracted away either. As far as I can tell from the interphase I have two UTXOs in the wallet, one with the majority of my coins and one tiny one of change that I'd like to combine into the larger amount.

I thought this would be as simple as spending the full wallet amount to a new receiving address for the same wallet, and watch as the two inputs were combined into two outputs. However when I did this the wallet simply spent to two outputs of the same amount (minus a tiny fee) regardless. So since I'm assuming my end goal is to in fact combine them into a single output, what are my options here?

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I thought this would be as simple as spending the full wallet amount to a new receiving address for the same wallet, and watch as the two inputs were combined into two outputs. However when I did this the wallet simply spent to two outputs of the same amount (minus a tiny fee) regardless

That is exactly what you are supposed to do. That it didn't work means that you did not specify the amount correctly. This could be because you either calculated the amount incorrectly or there is a software bug. I'm leaning towards the former.

If you calculated your amount by looking at a blockchain explorer, don't do that. It will result in an accurate balance calculation because of change addresses. Instead you should just use what your wallet reports back to you.

Most wallets have an option to send the maximum amount in a wallet. If your wallet has that option, use it instead of manually entering the amount. This will guarantee that your entire balance is sent to a single UTXO.

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  • This is exactly what I did, again using the Ledger wallet. But it did not result in a single output. I'll be trying again once the transaction confirms however to hopefully eliminate any error on my side.
    – Ariel Deschapell
    Jan 29, 2018 at 22:51
  • Repeating the process, I can confirm that even selecting "max" in the ledger wallet for the transfer amount creates a 2nd output which it then asks me to confirm on my Ledger. There doesn't seem to be any obvious way to override this and actually consolidate the two UTXOs into one.
    – Ariel Deschapell
    Jan 29, 2018 at 23:43

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