Author: Jeremy 2021-08-20 04:51:31
Published on: 2021-08-20T04:51:31+00:00
At a recent BitDevs conference in Austin, a new argument was presented in favor of removing the dust limit in Bitcoin transactions. The argument is based on the fact that the dust limit is a per-node relay policy and it is rational for miners to mine dust outputs given their low cost of maintenance compared to the immediate reward in fees. If txn relaying nodes censor something that a miner would mine, users will seek a private/direct relay to the miner and vice versa. This could lead to increased centralization of the network and reduced privacy. The tradeoff is whether a short-term incentive to promote network centralization is better or worse than a long-term node operator overhead. The speaker argued that having a dust limit is worse as it creates an incentive to produce or roll out centralizing software. On the other hand, not having a dust limit creates a mild incentive for node operators to improve decentralizing software like utreexo. However, it is difficult to quantify the magnitude of these incentives.
Updated on: 2023-06-15T00:46:32.919263+00:00