Author: David A. Harding 2021-08-10 06:14:41
Published on: 2021-08-10T06:14:41+00:00
In an email thread, Antoine Riard expresses his conservative viewpoint regarding increasing the standard dust limit. He is concerned that it would convert a higher percentage of Lightning Network (LN) channels capacity into dust and lower funds safety. However, Dave points out that this reasoning is incomplete as there are two related things at play - uneconomical outputs and the dust limit. While raising the dust limit can have the effect described by Antoine, increasing the minimum necessary feerate to get a transaction confirmed also converts a higher percentage of LN channel capacity into dust. Developers have no control over prevailing feerates, so this is a problem LN needs to address regardless of Bitcoin Core's dust limit. Dave further explains that any trust vector is introduced not by the dust limit but by the economics of outputs being worth less than they cost to spend. To compensate for the "dust" trust vector, LN node operators could use trustless probabilistic payments or side-trust models. Probabilistic payments were discussed in the general context of Bitcoin before LN was proposed and even included an opcode for creating them in Elements.Regarding Utreexo, Dave clarifies that it does not solve the problem at hand. Many nodes will still want to store the full UTXO set and access it quickly. Utreexo proofs will grow in size with UTXO set size, so full node operators will still not want their bandwidth wasted by people who create UTXOs they have no reason to spend.In conclusion, Dave agrees with Antoine that the status quo is good enough for now.
Updated on: 2023-06-15T00:46:04.760170+00:00