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Receive mining proceeds

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Sending a large number of transactions to a Ledger hardware wallet is troublesome. If you receive a lot of small transactions from mining please read this article carefully.

  Failing to follow these instructions may lead to your funds becoming inaccessible on a Ledger device.

Receiving many transactions is troublesome 

Receiving a large number of small payments, or dust payments, on an address controlled by your hardware wallet causes:

  • the saturation of the synchronization of your Blockchain transactions; and
  • an extremely long duration of transaction construction or validation.

Therefore, Ledger hardware wallets are not directly suited to receive mining proceeds for coins that use the UTXO models such as Bitcoin, Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash, etc. 

Imagine that you have received 1,000 payments of 0.001 BTC and that you want to spend a total of 1 BTC. The secure chip in the hardware wallet will then have to construct a transaction of 1,000 inputs and sign every single input. This might take a few hours or might not succeed at all, since the chip may overheat or make a computation error.

If you've received a lot of transactions

If you have already received a large number of transactions on your hardware wallet, Ledger Live may show the following symptoms:

  • Cannot add an account as the app keeps loading in the Add account window.
  • Affected accounts never fully synchronize.
  • Unable to send a transaction as it takes forever to calculate the Total to debit or the Ledger device does not show the transaction to verify and sign it.

Consolidate coins of affected accounts 

  • Try to consolidate your coins by sending a few larger payments to yourself. For example, if you have received 1,000 times 0.001 BTC, consolidate these inputs by sending 0.1 BTC to yourself and repeat this 10 times.
  • Alternatively, import your 24-word recovery phrase into a software wallet (at your own risk), preferably an offline one, and empty your account balance into an address that is derived from a newly generated seed. 

Prevent by batching transactions

  • Set up a software wallet that receives all mining payments;
  • Regularly batch these proceeds into a larger transaction to send to your Ledger hardware wallet. 

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