Author: Oleg Andreev 2021-08-08 21:41:32
Published on: 2021-08-08T21:41:32+00:00
A discussion on Bitcoin-dev mailing list about removing the dust limit from Bitcoin has taken place. Jeremy suggested that the dust limit should be removed because it's not their business what outputs people want to create. However, Matt Corallo argued that the size of the UTXO set is a fundamental scalability constraint of the system and today's dust limit is incredibly low. He proposed that the dust limit should be increased drastically to something more like 20 sat/vB. The real issue with the dust limit is the cost of utxo set storage, which is borne by every user. Two ways to address this are to make people pay for renting that storage or make storage extremely cheap so that it remains cheap at any scale. Utreexo perfectly solves this problem. Looking at private data because you can is a hack that creates issues of its own.Jeremy's five reasons for removing the dust limit were discussed. The first reason was that dust is spam. The second was dust fingerprinting attacks, and the third was the significant costs to every miner and full node operator. The other two reasons were related to the use of dust-sized htlcs in lightning and thinly divisible colored coin protocols. Matt argued that these schemes can and should use values which make them economical to spend. If people want to use outputs which they will not spend/"clean up" later, they should be using OP_RETURN. The appropriate way to solve this instead of including spendable dust outputs would be an OP_RETURN output.
Updated on: 2023-06-15T00:44:31.671735+00:00