Say I want to send a number of payments. Sometimes the wallet will use up my entire balance with change just to send some small amount, and this stops me from being able to send additional payments for fifteen minutes or however long it takes to get my full balance back.
Is there any way to avoid this in order to send a bunch of payments in succession? And if not, won't this be a big issue for average people's usage when the GUI is released?
There's no direct way, but there could be a workaround.
The protocol doesn't limit the number of inputs/outputs. So, you could split the first transaction into many outputs where some (or all) of them are going back to yourself. This way, you'd do all your payments at once, and get more than one change output. Yes, you'd pay more fees but you'd then continue with enough unspent outputs to avoid the experience of having most funds locked on every transaction. You could do it with the CLI wallet, too! The transfer command allows for many destinations.
transfer [<mixin_count>] <addr_1> <amount_1> [<addr_2> <amount_2> ... <addr_N> <amount_N>] [payment_id] - Transfer <amount_1>,... <amount_N> to <address_1>,... <address_N>, respectively. <mixin_count> is the number of extra inputs to include for untraceability (from 2 to maximum available)"
