Author: Benjamin Lindner 2013-03-11 18:17:04
Published on: 2013-03-11T18:17:04+00:00
On March 11, 2013, Mike Hearn expressed his opinion about minimizing the size of the UTXO set, stating that it was a solution in search of a problem. He believed that even with SD abusing micropayments as messages, the UTXO set was only a few hundred megabytes, which fit in RAM and disk. However, he also pointed out that the UTXO problem scales with the block size limit and should be fixed before considering increasing the block size limit. Jorge Timón disagreed with Peter Todd's suggestion to make transaction outputs with a value less than the transaction fee non-standard. He argued that this approach would disable legitimate use cases for payments that "are worth" less than the fees like smart property/colored coins. Instead, he proposed activating a non-proportional demurrage that incentives old transactions to be moved. The issue with this proposal is the skewed incentive structure, where rational miners will always include dust output with fees because the eternal cost of UTXO is paid by the network and future miners, not the current/individual miner. To solve this, miners can independently set their policies for what they confirm. A rule could be delegated to the user, allowing them to decide whether they want to have a limited or unlimited lifetime for their transaction output.
Updated on: 2023-06-06T10:32:57.530660+00:00