Author: Peter Todd 2022-07-26 12:45:12
Published on: 2022-07-26T12:45:12+00:00
In a recent email, Aaradhya Chauhan brought up the point that 1 sat/vB was once a good measure for dust protection when Bitcoin was trading at a much lower price. However, now that the price has increased, it may be a bit high as a dust protection measure and should be lowered slightly. They suggest that even if it is not lowered permanently, it should be lowered to half when prices double and keep oscillating at that point. It's not a consensus rule, so they believe it can be easily done with support from full node operators. Peter Todd responded to this suggestion by stating that if fee revenue is expected to be significant in the future with constant backlogs of low-fee transactions, lowering the dust limit now is a good way to ensure the entire ecosystem is ready to deal with those conditions. With blocks being close to full, the dust limit no longer provides value by reducing block usage. Instead, it artificially lowers mempool usage, which puts the Bitcoin system in a state that's quite unlike how we're expecting Bitcoin to operate in the future. Peter suggests removing the fixed dust limit entirely and relying purely on the mempool size limit to determine what is or is not dust.
Updated on: 2023-06-15T23:25:37.116716+00:00