Author: Billy Tetrud 2021-08-10 00:30:02
Published on: 2021-08-10T00:30:02+00:00
Jeremy Rubin, a Bitcoin developer, proposed removing the dust limit from Bitcoin citing various reasons. He mentioned that it's not their business to decide what outputs people create and that dust-sized HTLCs in Lightning force channels to operate in a semi-trusted mode which has regulatory implications. He also noted that thinly divisible colored coin protocols might make use of sats as value markers for transactions. However, Antoine Riard, another Bitcoin developer, is conservative about increasing the standard dust limit in any way as it would lower funds safety and create a trust vector in the reliability of peers. He believes smarter engineering solutions like utreexo on the base-layer side or multi-party shared-utxo should be used to solve the UTXO set growth issue. While Jeremy thinks that confidential transactions should not be prevented without compromising privacy or allowed transfers, it is highly unlikely that confidential transactions will be added to Bitcoin as it eliminates the ability for users to audit the supply of Bitcoin. Therefore, he thinks that camp is probably pretty large. Regardless of what happens, he doesn't think that future possibility is a good reason to change the dust limit today. The dust limit is still a scalability problem regardless of whether they use Utreexo eventually or not, although an accumulator would help a ton. One idea would be to destroy/delete dust at some point in the future. Nonetheless, even if they plan to do this, he still thinks the dust limit shouldn't be removed but rather lowered a bit.
Updated on: 2023-06-03T05:19:16.567744+00:00