Author: Danny Thorpe 2015-12-13 16:14:21
Published on: 2015-12-13T16:14:21+00:00
A proposal was put forth regarding the handling of dormant unspent transaction outputs (UTXOs) in the Bitcoin network. The proposal suggests that after 420,000 confirmations, UTXOs are considered dormant and a hash is committed to for all UTXOs generated in a block X-420,000. These UTXOs can then be deleted permanently from nodes' records after some confirmations. If a user wants to redeem a dormant UTXO, they must provide the scriptPubKey, height, UTXO value, and Merkle path to the dormant UTXO commitment in addition to their signature. To confirm transactions, miners will calculate new Merkle hashes with spent UTXOs replaced by 1 and commit the hash to the current block. Full nodes will keep an index of the latest dormant UTXO commitments to prevent double spending. This proposal works as a soft fork without segregated witness. It is suggested that dormant coin holders scan the blockchain for the current status of UTXO commitments and pay extra fees for increased transaction sizes. Confiscating or deleting dormant UTXOs may not be a sustainable option, but allowing them to grow indefinitely is also problematic.
Updated on: 2023-06-11T02:04:04.212232+00:00