I've never experienced difficulties or had an issue with crypto wallets, bitcoins, and bitcoin cash transaction,s and crypto in general before today's transaction. I was in urgent need of some cash had to sell some of my bitcoin cash earned from this platform to a local exchange for Naira. He needed bitcoin, so I had to use the convert to other cryptocurrencies service by sideshift.ai here on read.cash. It took a few means to receive the bitcoin on my wallet. But when I tried sending the bitcoin to the BTC wallet address provided by the buyer I received this transaction error: Missing inputs or UTXOs.
UTXO what?
I tried again but got the same transaction error.
At first, I thought that it could be that the wallet address is incorrect, I called the buyer to crosscheck and it came back the same. I retried the transaction again, there was no positive change.
I have neither experienced such an error nor heard about "UTXOs". what could that be? I turned to google for assistance and got something that worked for me.
The support page I visited gave three possible options to solve the problem and this worked for me:
Send what is possible using Max Amount, with default fee setting. This will leave the small UTXOs, but send out the non-dust ones.
So on the next try instead of inputting the amount of BTC I wish to send, I clicked on the MAX option, and the maximum amount that could be sent from my BTC balance appeared, I confirmed the transaction, and wala! It was successful.
What a relief. I needed the money urgently.
What was the transaction error about?
According to the trust wallet community support, the transaction was a dust error. The bitcoin was unable to send due to a dust error.
What is Dust?
In the crypto parlance, dust refers to the tiny amount of coins or tokens that remain in a particular wallet or address because the monetary value is smaller than the extra fee required to send it. This makes the transaction impossible to process.
What is UTXOs?
With Bitcoin and other UTXO-based coins like Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, and Dogecoin, an account balance is not just one value, but a sum of smaller values, called UTXO’s (unspent transaction output).
Although in the wallet only the sum is visible as balance, separate UTXOs exist under the hood and live their own life. Payment may include one, some, or all UTXOs, and as more UTXOs are included, more data is needed to describe the transaction, hence a higher fee.
Why does dust error occur?
If the amount of an UTXO is smaller than the partial fee needed to send it, that UTXO cannot be sent (with current fee level). If all UTXOs are dust, nothing can be sent from the account
Possible Solution?
According to Trust wallet support, the possible solutions are:
1. Do not send very small transactions with a high fee. Since the network will attempt to create a UTXO from a small transaction, the transaction will fail.
2. Send what is possible using Max Amount, with default fee setting. This will leave the small UTXOs, but send out the non-dust ones.
3. If nothing more can be sent with default fee setting (only dust UTXOs exist), try sending with lowered fee. You can adjust the fee from the transaction confirmation screen.
Warning: with low fee a transaction will take longer, sometimes even multiple days!
Resources:
https://community.trustwallet.com/t/unable-to-send-due-to-dust-error/1188
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/bitcoin-dust
Lead image by Mohamed Hassan from Pixabay
Thanks a million, tried it and it worked like magic.