Author: David A. Harding 2021-08-08 21:51:01
Published on: 2021-08-08T21:51:01+00:00
Jeremy suggests removing the dust limit from Bitcoin, which is a policy that refuses transactions with outputs below a certain amount. Dave argues that this limit should be kept because additional outputs added to the UTXO set increase the amount of work full nodes need to do to validate new transactions, and larger UTXO sets increase miners' costs, contributing towards centralization of mining. Allowing 0-value or 1-sat outputs minimizes the cost for polluting the UTXO set during periods of low feerates. Dust outputs can be used in various authentication/delegation smart contracts. Dust-sized HTLCs in lightning force channels to operate in a semi-trusted mode, which has implications for the regulatory classification of channels in various jurisdictions. Agnostic treatment of fund transfers would simplify this. Thinly divisible colored coin protocols might make use of sats as value markers for transactions. It's Dave's opinion that the dust limit is not creating any real problems, so it should be kept for its contribution to keeping full nodes faster, cheaper, and more efficient.
Updated on: 2023-06-03T05:22:03.417773+00:00