POLL: Allow dust transactions in Bitcoin? (5430 satoshis or less)

[ktttn]

I imagine a more blurred and less exact and lengthy and reliable way to process very small amounts is in order.
Microtransactions are important for impoverished people.
Dust should have a way of accumulating in a useful way up to say 16 digits.
lol satoshisatoshi.
Do change addresses not result in much dust?

[1715073223]

1715073223

[1715073223]

1715073223

[1715073223]

1715073223

[1715073223]

1715073223

[justusranvier]

I vote to Accept and relay dust transactions.

Your vote is meaningless unless you're talking about how you've already changed the appropriate settings your node's bitcoin.conf file.

[Eri]

While I don't know a huge amount about the technical stuff behind this if the 'dust' transactions are what I think they are then I think they should be kept, my reasoning being that one of Bitcoins main features are that it is easy to divide, if you restrict that then it becomes less useful and convenient. Then again, I could be entirely wrong and this is something completely different to what I'm thinking off, I was thinking that the restrictions were about people sending 0.000005 BTC amongst themselves or something.

dust has nothing to do with restricting decimal usage. you can still use all the decimals if you want. its just, in a sense, limiting your ability to send transactions that will cost the recipient more to send then what you sent them. (read carefully that last part) in fact. dust really has absolutely nothing to do with decimals. its a matter of value.

would you spend 1$, to mail in a coupon, for 1 penny off a online purchase? Sure it makes that thing online 1 penny cheaper but you just lost 1$ doing it! Who would do that? This is what the change prevents.

[Moogle]

Get rid of them. Anything less than a cent is a rediculous amount to srnd

[wolverine.ks]

would you spend 1$, to mail in a coupon, for 1 penny off a online purchase? Sure it makes that thing online 1 penny cheaper but you just lost 1$ doing it! Who would do that? This is what the change prevents.

if it cost the sender more than the amount sent, why would they do it indeed...

they would only send it if it were in their best interest, as determined by them.

someone might not spend $1 to send a penny coupon, but they might spend $1 to to do any of they many things you can do with a penny. sell it to a collector, melt it down for copper,  put it on a railroad track, squash it with a commemorative logo at Disney land...

there are even more things you can do with just 1 satoshi.

there are pros and cons to dust, but there are also unforeseen consequences. just be aware of that.

[True___Blue]

When BTC is trading at over $1000 all of that "dust" is going to be worth alot. If I can only use BTC to transfer large amounts of cash I would be using it much less than I am now.

[True___Blue]

I should mention also that as a Newbie I regularly use bitcoin faucet websites and now have to pay a hefty premium when I want to send BTC from the QT

[raze]

When BTC is trading at over $1000 all of that "dust" is going to be worth alot. If I can only use BTC to transfer large amounts of cash I would be using it much less than I am now.

When BTC is trading at over $1000, they'll change the rules regarding dust transactions so that it's value is sub-cent again.

Logic.

[Eri]

would you spend 1$, to mail in a coupon, for 1 penny off a online purchase? Sure it makes that thing online 1 penny cheaper but you just lost 1$ doing it! Who would do that? This is what the change prevents.

if it cost the sender more than the amount sent, why would they do it indeed...

they would only send it if it were in their best interest, as determined by them.

someone might not spend $1 to send a penny coupon, but they might spend $1 to to do any of they many things you can do with a penny. sell it to a collector, melt it down for copper,  put it on a railroad track, squash it with a commemorative logo at Disney land...

there are even more things you can do with just 1 satoshi.

there are pros and cons to dust, but there are also unforeseen consequences. just be aware of that.

You miss read what i said and your leaving out a step in the chain. Your basing your view on the original sender. not the person receiving it and being stuck with it, nor what effect that has on the blockchain. Sure their might be some reason to spend 1 satoshi where you might be willing to spend a 1$ to do it. But what you all want is to *force* users to receive these pennies and bloat the blockchain because these users in turn wont spend 1$ to send someone that penny you sent them, they find it worthless.


Better example(?)

If *I* send you 10,000 coupons at a value of 1 penny each for a total value is 100$, but the cost to mail in each coupon is 1$ would you mail them in? Those coupons may be worth 100$, but it would cost you 10,000$ to redeem them. Thats just how the blockchain and fee structure has worked all along. The problem isnt with the person spending 1 penny, its with the person receiving it. the problem is that if it costs them 1$ to use that penny, they simply wont use it. As a result the only way to prevent this unspendable dust from building up in the blockchain is to prevent it from being spent in the first place. The problem with this in bitcoin is that the blockchain cannot purge this information in the future when pruning is enabled. We will be stuck with it forever unless we all want to allow the client to start DELETING MONEY from the blockchain to save space. That obviously is NOT an option. We must be proactive about preventing unspendable transactions.

When BTC is trading at over $1000 all of that "dust" is going to be worth alot. If I can only use BTC to transfer large amounts of cash I would be using it much less than I am now.

what the client sees as 'dust' is a floating value, that means it changes based on the fee you can now set thanks to this update. That means 'dust' will always have a value below 1 penny, it doesnt matter if the value of bitcoin rises or falls.

I should mention also that as a Newbie I regularly use bitcoin faucet websites and now have to pay a hefty premium when I want to send BTC from the QT

Fact of the matter is, not enough people are using the new client to have *Any effect* on the bitcoin network yet. that 'hefty premium' you have to pay is hefty because people havnt updated to the latest version that lowers the fee from .0005 to .0001. That fee is configurable in your client now, it lets you decide what transaction you will and wont rely for the network. if people want fees lower or higher, they can download the new client and change it.

[Elanthius]

Why do people keep saying that the fee to spend dust is higher than the value of the dust itself? It is currently trivial to send transactions while paying a fee of only 1 satoshi per 1000 bytes. Dust, combined into larger transactions over 5430 satoshis, can easily be spent as long as you don't mind waiting a day or two for confirmation.

[True___Blue]

I'm away from my QT wallet right now, but I remember yesterday trying to send 0.5 BTC and I got a message saying the transaction would cost an extra 0.15 to process. I can check this again once I am near that computer again. I was under the assumption that in order to process the 0.5 transaction I was paying fees for the several previous transactions of under 5000 satoshis.

[LGT06]

When BTC is trading at over $1000 all of that "dust" is going to be worth alot. If I can only use BTC to transfer large amounts of cash I would be using it much less than I am now.

When BTC is trading at over $1000, they'll change the rules regarding dust transactions so that it's value is sub-cent again.

Logic.

How are they going to adjust the dust amount on the fly when BTC are trading at $650 USD on week and $200 USD the next week? Maybe letting miners decide what to include in the block chain instead of hard coding it into the software perhaps? I thought the whole point of this system was to let the market determine what works and to avoid using some human decree as the law of the land.

[solex]

When BTC is trading at over $1000 all of that "dust" is going to be worth alot. If I can only use BTC to transfer large amounts of cash I would be using it much less than I am now.

When BTC is trading at over $1000, they'll change the rules regarding dust transactions so that it's value is sub-cent again.

Logic.

How are they going to adjust the dust amount on the fly when BTC are trading at $650 USD on week and $200 USD the next week? Maybe letting miners decide what to include in the block chain instead of hard coding it into the software perhaps? I thought the whole point of this system was to let the market determine what works and to avoid using some human decree as the law of the land.

It will get changed with new versions of software and the devs will average the recent fx rate to determine the dust value.
It is utterly irrelevant that the dust value might be equivalent to 0.65c one week and 0.2c the next. If Bitcoin is a world-beating currency then dicking around with sub-cent transactions is like mostly using your Ferrari to go down your driveway to collect your mail.

[DeathAndTaxes]

How are they going to adjust the dust amount on the fly when BTC are trading at $650 USD on week and $200 USD the next week? Maybe letting miners decide what to include in the block chain instead of hard coding it into the software perhaps? I thought the whole point of this system was to let the market determine what works and to avoid using some human decree as the law of the land.

It isn't hardcoded it is based on min mandatory tx fee.  If a node is set to only relay/mine low priority tx with a min mandatory of 0.1 mBTC (10,000 S) then the dust is 54.3% of that (5430).  IF a node is set to relay/mine low priority txs with a min mandatory fee of 0.01 (1,000 S) then the dust is 54.3% of that (543 S).  If a node is set to relay/mine low priority txs with a min fee of 0 mBTC (0 S) then the dust is 54.3% of that (0 S).

If miner X won't accept include low priority tx without a fee of Y then that same miner will reject tx which attempt to create transactions that are less than half of Y.

[freethink2013]

When BTC is trading at over $1000, they'll change the rules regarding dust transactions so that it's value is sub-cent again.

Logic.

Sounds a bit like what happened in cypress tbh. I honestly don't think the attraction of bitcoin was that "they" could change the rules as they go.

[DeathAndTaxes]

When BTC is trading at over $1000, they'll change the rules regarding dust transactions so that it's value is sub-cent again.

Logic.

Sounds a bit like what happened in cypress tbh. I honestly don't think the attraction of bitcoin was that "they" could change the rules as they go.

If that sounds "like Cypress" then you probably need to read more.

Example.
Today in v0.8.2 the default min fee on low priority tx is 0.1mBTC (10,000 S) and thus the dust threshold is 5,430 S.
Current exchange rate ~$100 thus the min fee on low priority tx is ~$0.01 and dust threshold is ~$0.005 (half a penny).

Some day in the future the exchange rate has risen to $2,500 and thus some future version of the client has lowered the min mandatory fee on low priority tx to 0.004 mBTC (400 S).  This makes the dust threshold 217 S.  The purchasing power of those amounts are still ~$0.01 and $0.005.

Now how exact is that "like Cypress"?

[mmeijeri]

I'm undecided, but I'm also worried about the impact on the use of coloured coins.

[solex]

Wow. You are patient D&T

I'm undecided, but I worry about the impact on the use of coloured coins.

This is the sort of business which off-chain solutions can do (like fidelity-bonded chaum banks). If off-chain doesn't work for this - then it is a complete failure and we had better hope that Bitcoin scaling software solutions can deal with a super-big blockchain.

[freethink2013]

When BTC is trading at over $1000, they'll change the rules regarding dust transactions so that it's value is sub-cent again.

Logic.

Sounds a bit like what happened in cypress tbh. I honestly don't think the attraction of bitcoin was that "they" could change the rules as they go.

If that sounds "like Cypress" then you probably need to read more.

Example.
Today in v0.8.2 the default min fee on low priority tx is 0.1mBTC (10,000 S) and thus the dust threshold is 5,430 S.
Current exchange rate ~$100 thus the min fee on low priority tx is ~$0.01 and dust threshold is ~$0.005 (half a penny).

Some day in the future the exchange rate has risen to $2,500 and thus some future version of the client has lowered the min mandatory fee on low priority tx to 0.004 mBTC (400 S).  This makes the dust threshold 217 S.  The purchasing power of those amounts are still ~$0.01 and $0.005.

Now how exact is that "like Cypress"?

Maybe. But a currency that requires people to 'read more' is never going to be a currency that's widely accepted.

Here's how it's like cypress: a small group of people can suddenly decide to change things without consumers having any recourse. Currencies aren't about 'reading more' they are about usability and trust. Me and the rest of the world don't want to read more. We want to buy and sell stuff. Any hurdle you put in front of us is to the detriment of your currency.

It doesn't have to be like cypress to put people off but if it feels/sounds like it people will be put off. External intervention/meddling sets off my spidey senses. If you can't figure out a way to deal with the dust with out banning it then we may as well give up now. As someone posted above the 'dust' becomes significant if bitcoin's price rises. Makes me laugh that one of the accepted solutions is that people should stop using bitcoin and use litecoin instead. Seriously, I think some of you can't see the forest for the trees. You are dooming this currency.

Here's a saying I've always found to be true: The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

imho that's what's happening now.

Look at the poll results. I'm not alone.

[Rant2112]

The fundamental problem is negative externalities.

The dust-spender doesn't pay the cost of the transaction.

There should be a default transaction cost that's a best-guess of the actual cost of a dust transaction.  Mining software should default to reject transactions with smaller fees.