Author: Jim Phillips 2015-05-10 12:11:53
Published on: 2015-05-10T12:11:53+00:00
The email thread discusses the issue of UTXO growth and proposes a solution to reduce the size of the UTXO database. The typical wallet selects only the minimum number of unspent outputs when building a transaction, leaving lots of unspent outputs that are left unused. The proposal suggests designing wallets to consolidate unspent outputs by selecting all of the UTXOs from a particular address or wallet, sending however much needs to be spent to the payee, and sending the rest back to the same address or a change address as a single output. This method should shrink the UTXO database over time rather than growing it with each transaction. The developers of popular wallets like Core, Electrum, Armory, Mycelium, Breadwallet, Coinbase, Circle, Blockchain.info, and others have a vested interest in the continued usefulness of Bitcoin and should not be opposed to changing their UTXO selection algorithms to one that reduces the UTXO database instead of growing it. Miners benefit from these types of transactions as it reduces the amount of storage they need to dedicate to holding the UTXO. Relays could enforce this type of behavior by refusing to relay or deprioritizing the relay of transactions that don't use all of the available UTXOs from the addresses used as inputs.
Updated on: 2023-06-09T20:30:00.233119+00:00