Bitcoin Forum

As there is nothing new under the Sun, I suspect that this has been addressed before.

It has occurred to me that if the wallet clients do not make a concentrated effort to incorporate Dust into transactions when it will not affect the Transaction fee, then eventually all Bitcoins will turn to Dust. Analogy: If you only spend paper money and put the change in your pocket, eventually you will end up with a pocket full of change.

Some banks have no charge coin counting machines and all will accept rolled coins. We need some no cost way to consolidate Dust, or Dust will be all we have.

If all you have is dust, then you will use dust.
That sounded inspirational.

If all you have is dust, it is worth less than face value because of the transaction fees required to consolidate it.

As long as you have a single large coin, such as 10 BTC to 100 BTC, you can use that to consolidate your dust coins 50 outputs at a time for free, more or less (as long as the entire transaction is less than 10kb.)

For that, you'd need a client with coin control, preferably one that supports use of compressed public keys.

and this client would be called?

the vacuum

You can look at some scripts I wrote for my own use in collecting dust:

http://www.domob.eu/projects/coinCollection.php

They work for me, but note that you should know what you are doing (and be aware of the risks).

You can patch your own bitcoin-qt client, or you can use one pre-compiled (and signed) by other trustworthy members. Or you can use Armory as that has coin control.

here's my coin control :P
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=144331.60

That is incorrect.  The 0.8.2 client prevents the creation of dust (transactions with output below the dust threshold).  There is no reason one ever needs to either intentionally or accidentally create an output below the dust threshold (unless one explicitly wanted to transfer an amount below it).

If all dust is systematically consolidated into larger coins (compared to "never mix coins
from different sources and let the dust gather dust"), would this result in more
database operations/larger blockchain files for all full clients? (more inputs/tx on average)

Blockchain would be better prunable if dust is consolidated, of course.