Send for the first time

Intended reader: someone making their first outgoing payment from Universe Wallet. Goal: an amount arriving at someone else’s address, with no asset spent by accident. Prerequisites: a funded wallet, a backed-up phrase, and the recipient’s address. Chain and network: Bitcoin mainnet in this example. Safety: this is irreversible. Nothing on this page can undo a confirmed transaction.

Sending is behind a release gate

The send and broadcast screens sit behind the bitcoin/send and bitcoin/broadcast gates. Whether they work in your build was decided when that build was released, not by this documentation. If the screen tells you the operation is not available in your build, it is not available, and no setting changes that. See Why an action is unavailable.

Two facts first

1. Coins are spent whole. Paying 0.02 BTC from a 0.03 BTC coin does not leave that coin partly spent. The whole coin is consumed and the remainder comes back to you as a change output. See Inputs, outputs, fees, change.
2. The fee follows size, not amount. Sending 10 BTC costs the same as sending 0.001 BTC if the transaction is the same size in bytes.

Steps

1. Send a test amount first. Small enough that losing it would be annoying rather than serious.
2. Open Send, and confirm the account and network at the top of the screen.
3. Paste the recipient address. Compare the first four and last four characters against the source.
4. Enter the amount.
5. Choose a fee. See Choose a fee.
6. Read the review screen. Do not skim it. See Review a transaction.
7. Approve, or reject. Rejecting costs nothing.
8. Wait for the test amount to arrive at the other end and be confirmed.
9. Only then send the real amount.

Expected result

The transaction appears in Activity as pending, then gains confirmations. Your available balance drops by the amount plus the fee. A change output returns to an address you own.

How to verify

• The recipient confirms arrival of the test amount.
• Your activity entry shows the fee you chose, not a larger one.
• Your total balance dropped by amount plus fee, and no asset you hold has moved.

Common failures

What you see	What it means	What to do
Not enough available balance, though the total looks fine	Some coins are protected and cannot fund a plain payment	See Protected outputs.
The transaction stays pending for a long time	The fee rate was below what the network is currently clearing	Wait. See the warning below about fee bumping.
The change output is missing on the review	The remainder is being paid entirely as fee	Reject. Do not approve a transaction whose change line you cannot account for.
The screen says the operation is not available in this build	The release did not authorize it	Nothing you can change. See Why an action is unavailable.

There is no way to speed up a stuck transaction from inside the wallet

You can mark a transaction as replaceable when you create it, and that flag is off by default. But Universe Wallet 1.7.5.8 has no fee bump, no speed up, and no child-pays-for-parent flow. Marking a transaction replaceable does not give you a way to replace it here. If a payment is stuck, your options are to wait, or to use separate software that can build a replacement. Choose the fee carefully the first time.

Recovery path

There is none after confirmation. Before broadcast, rejecting the approval is free and complete. That is why the review screen is the last real safety control you have, and why it is worth the thirty seconds.

Related

• Send bitcoin
• What a signature authorizes