Author: Thomas Guyot-Sionnest 2017-08-21 13:35:22
Published on: 2017-08-21T13:35:22+00:00
In a bitcoin-dev email thread, Major Kusanagi suggests that the only way to make bitcoins last forever is to accept unbounded UTXO growth which is unscalable, or limit UTXO growth and thus make it impossible for bitcoins to last forever. In response, Lucas Clemente Vella argues that limiting UTXO growth does not improve scalability. He suggests that lost/stale coins should be returned to miners as a fee instead of being burnt. He proposes a solution where UTXO age in block count should be limited to 5 generations, where each generation is 210k blocks or over 15 years. All UTXOs from the first generation would be invalidated and returned to a "pool" on the first block of the sixth generation. Every mined block could reclaim FLOOR(P/B) satoshi along with miner's reward and transaction fees, where P is the total value reclaimed since the last halving and B is the leftover blocks. Any remainder from the pool at the end of a generation would be carried over. This would reduce the reliance of miners on actual transaction fees and ensure that old blocks are cleared after a few generations and lost coins eventually get back into circulation.
Updated on: 2023-06-12T03:47:00.980030+00:00