If this isn't the right place for this, appologies. But I thought I would document some findings, and hopefully engage in some discussion or get some inspiration on what else to look for. I realize I should probably have a time series dataset as well... I'm very curious to model the hodl waves. If any of my data points below are egregiously wrong, knowing that would be good also haha. It's entirely possible I'd have a data integrity issue, despite my best efforts on that front.
I started looking at the utxos (I'm storing them all, and toggling an is_spent to true when they are used). Trying to make sense of what would be considered dust, or likely lost due to time and size. Since Bitcoins start, I see 3.2 billion utxos, of which 179,288,217 haven't been spent (yet)... of that group 86,898,633 of them have a balance of less than 1000 sats (0.00001 BTC or roughly $1 USD currently - at or below network fees). The combined total of all of this unspent 'dust' is 426.3546 BTC. Already this year (2025, or since block 877279) 18.95 BTC has been added to this pile of dust. If I set it to 0.0001 as the threshold, the total is 56.9 so far this year. Worth noting my database was last updated about 20 hours ago, need to create a cron to ingest on every new block as they come. Work in progress...
Is this 0.0001 dust accumulation primarily due to negligence? Or is some other mechanism leading to so much of it? If anyone has ideas of other things to look into I'd love some suggestions
I think my goal at the end of this is to help others learn about BTC (and with this one, learning how not to end up with dust - by reminding people to consolidate when possible), I have been told I'm fairly good at taking complex and breaking it down to easier to understand language. I'm still very much in learning mode myself... having fun.