Bitcoin to Monero guide

Pick the wallet before you pick the amount

The first decision isn't how much to send. It's where the monero is going to live afterwards. Pick that wallet, install it, let it sync, and open it — then come back and work out the amount.

The reason is boring and practical. A wallet you haven't opened yet can't give you a receiving address, and an address you copied from somewhere else is a coin flip. Monero addresses are ninety-five characters long. Nobody proofreads that string properly, so the only safe source is the wallet's own receive screen, copied with the copy button.

A standard address opens with a 4. If yours opens with an 8, that's a subaddress, and it works the same for receiving. Both are the same length. What you shouldn't do is dig up a payment ID or an integrated address unless something specifically asks for one — subaddresses replaced that whole mechanism, and reaching for it now just adds a step you can get wrong.

Send one deposit, not four

Pay the deposit address once. Every extra transaction you send costs another bitcoin fee, and each one has to be matched to the same order, which is where support tickets come from.

There's a second reason. If you send a top-up after the first payment has already confirmed, the second one may arrive after the order has moved on, and sorting that out takes far longer than sending the right amount would have. Work out the number first, then send it once.

Set the fee to match what the mempool looks like right now, not what it looked like last week. Bitcoin fees are quoted in satoshis per virtual byte and they move with demand. Underpaying doesn't fail loudly — the transaction just sits there.

When the deposit sticks

A pending bitcoin transaction can't be cancelled. That's the first thing to accept, because most of the bad advice about stuck payments starts with pretending otherwise.

What you can do is replace it. If your wallet signalled replace-by-fee when it built the transaction, you can rebroadcast the same payment with a higher fee and give miners a reason to include it. Most wallets label this as bumping or speeding up the fee. If the option isn't there, replace-by-fee wasn't signalled, and the realistic move is to wait for fees across the network to drop.

While you wait, don't send a second payment to the same deposit address as a workaround. You'll end up with two deposits against one order.

After the monero lands

The wallet will show the balance as soon as the transaction is in a block, and then it will refuse to let you spend it for a while. That's normal. Every received output is locked for ten blocks, about twenty minutes, and there's no setting that shortens it.

If you're going to move the coins onward, wait for the lock to clear rather than queueing a send that can't go out yet. And check the amount against the quote while you're there — small differences come from the network fees on both sides and from the spread in the rate, all of which were already priced in before you sent.

Four quick answers