Author: Andreas Schildbach 2015-05-09 19:00:33
Published on: 2015-05-09T19:00:33+00:00
The email is a suggestion from Jim Phillips on how to deal with the issue of unspent transaction output (UTXO) growth in Bitcoin wallets. He suggests that rather than dealing with the issue at the protocol level, it should be addressed at the source of the problem - in wallets. Currently, wallets select only the minimum number of UTXOs when building a transaction to keep the fee low. Consequently, many UTXOs are left unused and are therefore not consolidated. Phillips suggests that all UTXOs from a particular address or wallet should be selected for a transaction, with the excess amount sent back as a single output to shrink the UTXO database over time instead of growing it.Phillips suggests that the developers of the most commonly used wallets have a vested interest in the continued usefulness of Bitcoin and should not be opposed to changing their UTXO selection algorithms to reduce the UTXO database. He also believes that miners would benefit from these transactions because it would reduce the amount of storage they need to dedicate to holding the UTXO, and relays could help promote good behavior by refusing to relay or deprioritizing transactions that don't use all available UTXOs from the addresses used as inputs. The email was sent to the Bitcoin-development mailing list on September 5th, 2015.
Updated on: 2023-06-09T20:28:38.502984+00:00