Author: damian at willtech.com.au 2021-12-09 06:27:04
Published on: 2021-12-09T06:27:04+00:00
The email thread is discussing the possibility of 0 sat outputs and their impact on Bitcoin. The original email from Ruben Somsen outlines Jeremy's argument that intentionally creating a 0 sat output to avoid a soft fork would be uneconomical compared to creating dust outputs. He also suggests that even if a 0 sat output was confirmed without being spent, it could still eventually be spent as long as none of its inputs were spent elsewhere. Ruben notes that there is a possibility that a user could unintentionally behave in a way that causes a 0 sat output to remain unspent, but this seems unlikely. He outlines the scenario where this could happen and questions whether it would be acceptable to avoid a soft fork. Jeremy responds that he does not believe 0 value outputs are a big problem, as long as they are spent eventually. He suggests that it would be rational for miners and users who care about bloat to save the transaction spending the 0 sat output to resurrect it if necessary. However, he agrees that if it is more expensive to create a 0 sat output than a dust output, it would not be economically rational to do so. The email then discusses the possibility of a utxo with drop semantics, which would expire and become unspendable if not spent in the block it was created. This would allow for 0 value outputs to be present in the mempool for attaching fees but be treated like an op_return otherwise. Two cases for this are suggested: one bare segwit version and one equivalent to taproot. The discussion concludes with the suggestion that sponsors may make more sense than expiring utxos, but expiring utxos would be simpler.
Updated on: 2023-06-03T06:49:20.277956+00:00