Topic: POLL: Allow dust transactions in Bitcoin? (5430 satoshis or less) - page 3. (Read 5167 times)

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.

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.


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.


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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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?

I vote to Accept and relay dust transactions.

It seems to me that services like coinbox.me allow you to have your cake and eat it too when it comes to tiny transactions.  Why not just go with a service like that if you are inclined to send out small transactions?  Then the recipient can just pick it up along with all his faucet earnings.

Yeah, a real world banking system would never allow consumers and businesses to carry out small transactions in the denominations they want, or keep records of those transactions. They know that anything below $1000usd is just clutter. All that data is taking up too much space, damnit, and a man's gotta eat.

edit: I sort of cracked my joke without making my point...I think hard coding a lower limit to transaction size is foolish. Blockchain bloat is very real, and growing exponentially. Limiting dust txs just delays the inevitable, and doesn't address the root of the issue, which is every node needing to possess humanity's accounting. So the options are to offload blockchain hosting to a trusted entity and start central banking anew, but 1850s central banking, where they might just maybe probably skip town with all of your hard earned color, or...I am not sure what.

DeathandTaxes, my man! Long time no see. I must say, my opinion on this did change a bit after reading your post, and opened my eyes to the true scale of this explosive growth. Would you be so kind as to do a simple man such as myself the courtesy of setting me straight on the community's current plan to curb blockchain size beyond this stopgap measure? I've been away for a while (not in jail, just not on bitcointalk).

100% in favor of invalidating all transactions below one US cent. In satoshis, that means the minimum should be regularly changed, but that isn't a problem.

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.

There is a difference between the freedom of speech and the requirement of someone to listen.  If you feel dust transactions are "valuable" then simply find people who are willing to relay and mine them for you.  Problem solved.   0.8.2 simply prevents nodes who don't share the "value" of massive UXTO bloat (a cost shared by all for the benefit of a few) to not actively assist you in that goal.

additionally, the argument that it costs more to spend than the transaction is worth....
you are comparing apples and oranges. one persons costs to another persons value.  additionally, there are non monetary values associated with those transactions that make it more valuable than it's face value.

a miner should have the choice to relay or not relay any transaction they choose and at any price they choose. yes I realize that dust is not technically prohibited. but it is also a dangerous targeting of a once successful bitcoin business. additionally, would this spamming of the block chain increase fees for everyone, and therefore increase revenue for miners, thereby increasing the security of the block chain and reducing the network deficit?

You do understand that dust is linked to min tx fee on low priority txs right?  That fee has declined by a factor of 100x from 0.01 to 0.0001 BTC as the exchange rate has risen.  There is nothing to indicate this won't continue to happen.   If the tx has economical value then miners have lowered their fees to below that and thus what was previously dust is no longer dust.  Also 0.8.2 doesn't prevent the spending of dust it simply prevents (for nodes that follow the default value) the creation of dust with the current default threshold set at 54.3% of the min fee


 Dust will always be dust. Low value regardless of if you measure it in fiat equivalence of the amount of goods and services which can be purchased.  They are worthless because it costs more to spend than it is worth spending.  This means (and the blockchain is good history of this) that it won't be spent and every node keeps it in the UXTO forever.  Nobody benefits, everyone pays additional overhead of being a peer. 

If you found a penny on the street but the only way to spend it was to mail it (say to your mortgage/rent holder) at a cost of $0.42?  Spend $0.43 to pay down $0.01 of your rent?  Would you?  Sure it has >0 value but seeing as it is worth less than the transaction cost if your only way to spend it was to mail at a higher cost you never would.  Now imagine everyone in the world had to keep track of the fact that you have that penny ... forever.  That is Bitcoin.

This polls like this only highlight a misconception of Bitcoin.  There is no "network" as if it is a single unified structure; the "network" is a loose association of independent nodes.  If you think the default dust threshold of 0.0543 mBTC (5430 satoshis) is too high then change the min mandatory fee required for your node to relay (and/or mine) low priority transactions.  The min mandatory fee on low priority txs in 0.8.2 is 0.1 mBTC (10,000 S).  The dust threshold is 54.3% of the min fee.  There is a reason for this as it is the relationship between the size of an input and the resulting transaction for the most common form (2 inputs, 1 output, 1 change output).  Still I wish the developers had gone with the slightly less precise but easier to explain 50% ("dust is half the min fee").  If you change the min mandatory fee for low priority transaction you can change the dust threshold.

If you run a node which has a min mandatory fee of 0.10 mBTC (10,000 S) to relay transactions CONGRATULATIONS you are using the default dust threshold of 0.0543 mBTC (5430 S)    0.1 * 54.3% = 0.0543
If you run a node which has a min mandatory fee of 0.04 mBTC ( 4,000 S) to relay transactions CONGRATULATIONS you have lowered the dust threshold to 0.02172 mBTC (2172 S)    0.04 * 54.3% = 0.02172
If you run a node which has a min mandatory fee of 0.25 mBTC (25,000 S) to relay transactions CONGRATULATIONS you have raised the dust threshold to 0.1629 mBTC (16,290 S)    0.25 * 54.3% = 0.1629

- Need a "No idea" or "Just show me the results" option or else people will just click one to see the results.

- "Mandatory fee" doesn't even make sense because each miner will decide; there are ultimately no mandators in the Bitcoin world and I think this is a slight but important indicator of thinking about this in the wrong way a way that is inefficient. It makes people freak out because they think everything has to be consensus and unilateral. Really people will do what they want with dust transactions on their own terms, and the devs can only stay in their role as long as they continue to support the miners' ability to do just that. The new changes to lay the groundwork for a fee market to arise are a big step toward this.