How do I send bitcoin to somebody else?

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A main way that you can send bitcoin to somebody else is “through the chain”.

A second way that you might be able to send bitcoin to somebody else is through “bitcoin Lightning”.  This “Lightning” only works if you have an account with some bitcoin exchange that supports Lightning, and it only works if the person to whom you want to send the bitcoin is using a bitcoin exchange that also supports Lightning.  I have a small amount of bitcoin in Strike, so I could do this.  I think most often when somebody uses Lightning it is to send some small amount of bitcoin.

If you are sending bitcoin to somebody “through the chain”, and if you have bitcoin in an exchange, then you could send it from the exchange.  As mentioned above, I have a small amount of bitcoin in Strike, so I could do this.  But for lots of reasons, this ought not to happen very often, because probably you should never leave any large amount of bitcoin in any exchange for any long amount of time.  And if the amount of bitcoin you are sending is small, and if you are not very worried about privacy, maybe Lightning will be the best way to go.

Unless you are using Lightning, most often what you would probably prefer to do is send the bitcoin “from your hardware wallet”.  This means that the entire transaction happens in a way that most people cannot see.  It is not completely secret and anonymous, but it is mostly secret and mostly anonymous.

Here are some of the pros and cons of these three ways to send bitcoin:

When you are sending bitcoin “on the chain”, you will be given the opportunity to pick how much money to pay for the transfer, and how fast you want it to get to where it is going.

Here are examples of recent choices that I was offered on Strike for sending bitcoin.  In each case I list the amount of money I was getting ready to send (in equivalent dollars), and I list the fee (in equivalent dollars), and I list the fee as a percentage of the amount of money I was getting ready to send:

As you can see, with Strike you can save a lot of money by being willing to accept the transfer being very slow.  One “flexible” transfer took 12 hours.  Another “flexible” transfer took 6 hours.

Here are examples of recent choices that I was offered in Trezor Suite for sending bitcoin:

What’s interesting to see is that the fee offered in Trezor Suite seems to be only weakly affected by the amount of money being transferred.

When you are getting ready to send some bitcoin to somebody, one of the things that the recepient must do is provide an “address” to you.  When the recipient is doing this, he or she could use the same address over and over again.  But it is considered a best practice and is highly recommended to use a new address for each bitcoin transfer.  It does not cost more money to create and use a new address.  And it protects your financial privacy and, to a lesser extent, your security.   So it is to your advantage to nudge the recipient to generate a new address for this transfer that you are getting ready to do.

It turns out that bad people will try to infect your smart phone or computer or web browser with malware that will try to intercept such outbound bitcoin.  So you need to be really careful whenever you send bitcoin.  Check carefully with the would-be recipient of the transfer, to make absolutely sure you know their “address” that the bitcoin is to be sent to.  When you enter the “address” to which the bitcoin is being sent into your phone or computer, make absolutely sure the address is what it is supposed to be.

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