If you have a UTXO whose amount is less than the cost to move it at a given feerate, that UTXO is economically unspendable at that time: it simply costs more to use than it brings to the transaction. You should avoid using such UTXOs at that time and wait until feerates are lower. If you use a wallet that permits you to select UTXOs specifically, you could already submit this consolidation transaction now already. Your wallet will then ignore all the low-value UTXOs tied up by that transaction until the point that the transaction gets confirmed, and your wallet should automatically rebroadcast that transaction until it is included in a block.
When feerates are low, aim to consolidate especially UTXOs with low amounts and/or inefficient output types. E.g. legacy UTXOs (P2PKH) weigh 148 bytes to spend, while native segwit (P2WPKH) UTXOs only take 68 vbytes and Taproot UTXOs (P2TR) spent per the keypath cost only 57.5 vB. Since the latter weigh less to spend in transactions, they will only be economically unspendable at a higher feerate given the same amount.
Generally, you probably want to aim for a minimum amount of at least 1 mBTC (100'000 sats), but preferably even 5–10 mBTC.
So what to do right now concretely? If you do have a UTXO with a large amount, you could use that to open a channel. If you only have low-amount UTXOs, but want to make payments right now, you might want to consider buying a balance on a custodial lightning service and making the payments from there.
Since you’re already in a tough spot, I will assume you’re willing to try creative methods. Check out psbt.io where you can schedule your transaction to be broadcast when the fee rate drops below a given threshold. Technically you’re relying on a third party, but it might be better than being stuck with dust.
Valid concerns at this moment in time… To your original question however, it sounds like you are looking for an answer to a problem that unfortunately doesn’t exist in this current fee market. Quasi-solution is to wait and hope for lower fees, or come to terms with that fact those coin(s) are effectively burned.
May I suggest taking this experience to learn and implement creative measures to prevent such a predicament in the future? There are ways to use Bitcoin with layer 2 systems (not just LN), that effectively solve the issues of a high fee market environment.
There have always been growing pains of how people use bitcoin, and this is just one of them. Adaptation is survival.
Why should any user of Bitcoins network wait because they can't afford to make a transaction?
The second half of your question seems like it answers the first
If you can't afford X, you can't obtain X. Defining X as "space in a soon-to-be-mined block" doesn't change that equation.
If that is the price a user has to pay for "using Bitcoin wrong" then we have serious problems that need addressed
What problem? It seems like a fair price to me. If Timmy obtained tiny utxos and now he can't spend them, that's no one's fault but Timmy's. Timmy shouldn't expect someone to fix his problems for him. He should learn from them so he doesn't make the same mistake again.
it is possible [to] permission and gate people from being able to use it
That does not follow if you define "use bitcoin" as "spend sufficiently large utxos." Timmy doesn't need permission to do that.
Bitcoin is working exactly as designed. Your problem is temporal in nearly every aspect.
If you are so concerned about bitcoin “failing” then consolidate some UTXOs to make them greater than the fee and donate to core devs. And if we are talking about one UTXO here, then honestly what are we really even talking about? The avg fee right now is about 7000 sats right now (which mind you is still going to miners)… How many people out there using Bitcoin really have <7000 sat UTXOs right now?
Honestly at this point I’m starting to think you just made a burner account to troll
Yeah, the best way to handle small value UTXOs is to consolidate them into a large UTXO.
If this is a single small UTXO that you have, then it gets a bit more complicated, but you can participate in a coinjoin with other users, that also performs some kind of swap to another chain or lightning channel.
I don’t think having a developing fee market is a weakness. This is literally how the security of the chain will be paid for in the future.
I do agree that Ordinals are an attack on the usability of the chain. Smarter people than I will have to contend with that issue, hopefully without censorship.
If I didn’t know any better I’d say that Ordinals token that got listed on Binance is being used to fund this bullshit.
Bitcoin is in the “then they fight you” phase. Along with hostile governments, unfortunately there are billions of dollars worth of shitcoins out there with a vested interest in destroying Bitcoin, because as long as Bitcoin is successful, their VC funded shitcoin of choice solves exactly 0 problems. Ordinals (includes BRC-20 garbage) are an obvious attack on the usability of the chain and the fungible nature of Bitcoin.
The feerates are denominated in bitcoin, so value of fees and UTXO value rise and fall in tandem. To be less susceptible, you need to either have more blockspace-efficient UTXOs (i.e. reduce the amount of blockspace you need to bid on when you send a transaction) or collect more money in fewer UTXOs, so that fees are a smaller proportion of the total amount---preferably both.
Bitcoin is about consistent learning for all of us. Usually what happens is you run into a problem and then find out something new about how bitcoin works.
You are now finding out that having small UTXO's on chain is a bad practice. BTW you can still spend it. Just set a low TX fee & wait a few weeks/months.
As an "uncle Jim" holding friends & families bitcoin you need to know more about all this. Make use of lightning & even liquid to consolidate in future.
You cannot use fiat currency to define the value of Bitcoin. If the value of fiat currency were zero, then even 1 sat would be infinite.
But obviously Bitcoin won't be infinite, so maybe you can exchange other useful items for fees.
Can feel your pain. I had lots of 100k UTXOs from coinjoin postmix transcations and consolidated all of them when fees were < 10sats/vB.
I wrote a bash script that checks https://mempool.space/api/v1/fees/recommended and sends a push notification using pushover.net service to my phone when fees are < x sats/vB so I can broadcast a transaction quickly when it's time. Probably I'll automate that even further to do the broadcast automatically using https://mempool.space/tx/push
Wallet software should warn users about the dust limit when creating small UTXOs. "Funds will not be spendable in high-fee environments".
This is equivalent to the central bank deciding to expire old coins or notes. In fiat it's done because of inflation and other reasons, but Bitcoin is not static either. It needs to be communicated clearly, and wallets haven't had a real fee market to deal with for a few years.
There is talk of supporting hardware wallets for lightning, BitBox-guys are prototyping something with Greenlight, but I'm not aware of a finished solution.
Lightning isn't built for offline/cold storage. The protocol assumes you will have a lightning node or watchtower that monitors the blockchain to see if the other channel party tries to cheat by publishing an old channel balance, so that your node publish a second transaction to counter it. Channels are based on 2of2 multisigs and transactions spending from them must be signed by both parties, so if the only channel states that exist are with the significant majority of the balance on your side, then you should be fairly okay, unless one side's node software decides to force-close the channel for some reason, and spends most of the balance in on-chain fees.
You could use Blixt & Dunder LSP with what others have claimed to be hosted channels. Sounds semi-custodial if this is the same kind of hosted channels I've read about before. Basically the LSP could rug you and you end up holding a "proof of rug" and no sats unless you take it to the courts or something. Haven't looked deeper into this yet, could be wrong.
User Experience
Attempting to switch to lightning