Author: Erik Aronesty 2021-10-01 13:40:06
Published on: 2021-10-01T13:40:06+00:00
The discussion on the Bitcoin-dev mailing list is centered around lightweight nodes and their ability to ignore UTXOs below the dust limit, while still validating POW and other transactions. This approach would not validate dust txs, which could lead to potential attacks where invalid but ignored dust txs are accepted in a series of valid mined blocks. However, this attack seems as expensive as a 51% attack. David Harding argues that allowing 0-value or 1-sat outputs minimizes the cost for polluting the UTXO set during periods of low feerates. He also points out that larger UTXO sets increase costs for miners and contribute towards centralization of mining, making it necessary to have relay policies that avoid economically irrational behavior. Pieter Wuille agrees with David's views, stating that Bitcoin's consensus rules fail to account for the externality of UTXO set size. The thread also discusses the use of dust outputs in various authentication/delegation smart contracts, dust-sized HTLCs in lightning, and thinly divisible colored coin protocols that might make use of sats as value markers for transactions. While some members of the group feel colored coin protocols have no business being on the Bitcoin chain due to scalability issues, others argue for their inclusion. Finally, the group touches on confidential transactions, and the possibility of preventing them without compromising privacy or allowed transfers. It is suggested that range proofs can be used to prevent these types of transactions from becoming part of the blockchain, while still being able to relay them.
Updated on: 2023-06-03T05:20:00.180842+00:00