1 to 1000 Taproot UTXO Explosion. Why? \ stacker news ~bitcoin

3345 sats \ 24 comments \ @antic 18 Nov 2023 bitcoin

Seeing a transaction like this once or twice, I might not think too hard on it.

But nearly every block since the fee pump started, we've seen one of these giant taproot UTXO explosion transactions that seems to be just exploding out the contents of a taproot UTXO into 1000 new UTXO distributions:

What would be a functional reason for wanting a single taproot UTXO to become 1000 UTXOs at a significant fee tradeoff?

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449 sats \ 14 replies \ @antic OP 18 Nov 2023

It gets weirder. These transactions seem to be reducing their outputs to entirely fees.

Here's one transaction that started as one of these 1000 UTXO explosions:

https://mempool.space/tx/0fadd6f563e379911511d0a66527840ee69a6d717f5e0ebe4930e1568a86df13

This split up .45 BTC into 1000 UTXOs of .00032514 each.

But then they each sent a new output like this:

https://mempool.space/tx/c4328feb964a63615bddc108a15af53260fc56613139c0cf82fcbc934585cbfc

sending only .00000294 BTC and spending the rest in miner fees.

Is this just miners, exploding and contracting UTXOs to pump fees...?

Or is this just a very expensive coinjoin?

31 sats \ 9 replies \ @okpj 18 Nov 2023

Both of the blocks those tx were confirmed in were mined by f2pool

63 sats \ 8 replies \ @antic OP 18 Nov 2023

yeah, I wonder if it's f2 specifically doing some shenanigans...

This kind of transaction that outputs 294 sats at the cost of 32,220 sats to a miner fee only makes sense if you are the one mining the transaction--and seeing this being done thousands of times... super sus.

0 sats \ 7 replies \ @antic OP 18 Nov 2023

but then I see these appearing in MARA and Foundry... super odd...

1415 sats \ 2 replies \ @okpj 18 Nov 2023

Did a little digging using Ordpool—

https://ordpool.space/tx/c4328feb964a63615bddc108a15af53260fc56613139c0cf82fcbc934585cbfc

brc-20 token minting — all of them. You can look the tx up in Ordpool to confirm. So not miner collusion, just shitcoins.

{"p":"brc-20","op":"mint","tick":"dfsn","amt":"5"}

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @antic OP 18 Nov 2023

Thanks! I find this usage to be totally insane but I guess it’s a thing people want to do. So bizarro.

12 sats \ 0 replies \ @okpj 18 Nov 2023

Once Binance listed ORDI it was game on I think.

0 sats \ 3 replies \ @antic OP 18 Nov 2023

maybe they've calculated it forward and realized that by doing this kind of operation, it doesn't matter who collects the fees because the increased block fees are giving every block an additional 2BTC+ so they make it up and then some every time they successfully mine a block.

Interesting case for decentralized collusion.

0 sats \ 2 replies \ @SpaceHodler 18 Nov 2023

And I guess having more pools wouldn't help, because they could all still collude and achieve the same result. It would just be harder for a larger set of entities to collude.

But doesn't the prisoner's dilemma work against such collusion?

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @antic OP 18 Nov 2023

Does it? If you spend .25BTC every 5 blocks in order to pump the average fee price in the mempool, you mine 1/5 of the blocks, you recapture some of that spend, and ensure that when you do mine a block, you get an extra 2-3BTC in fees. Has someone done a robust modeling of the trade-off for a large miner to engage in this kind of behavior?

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @SpaceHodler 18 Nov 2023

And what if you don't spend extra, will you not get an extra 2-3 BTC in fees because the others did?

Sorry if I'm not making sense, I haven't thought much about it and am just thinking out loud. If there are indeed incentives for collusion, wouldn't this be a long term solution to the security budget issue? They would be incentivized to spend even more for even higher block rewards, but not so much that Bitcoin becomes useless and loses value.

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1 sat \ 0 replies \ @badabing 18 Nov 2023

294 sats tx are ordinals I think.

1 sat \ 2 replies \ @OT 18 Nov 2023

I'm not completely sure, but those 294 sat UTXO's are now below the dust level, thereby uneconomical to ever spend again. I heard "stamps" do this, but I don't understand how they can sell it again if it can't move.

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @antic OP 18 Nov 2023

I suppose you could sell the actual private key… but then how do you ensure that only one person knows the key? Maybe that’s handled by wrapping it up in an abstraction. Seems like ultimately these just end up adding to the pile of permanently lost BTC.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @OT 18 Nov 2023

Looks like @okpj found that they are BRC20 tokens getting minted. Not sure how it works, but if it continues I'm definitely looking into mining to take back some sats for proper use. Lol

31 sats \ 2 replies \ @4 18 Nov 2023

50 sats \ 1 reply \ @antic OP 18 Nov 2023

What tool is this?

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @antic OP 18 Nov 2023

oh, haha, it's in the watermark: breadcrumbs.app

143 sats \ 0 replies \ @Zepasta 18 Nov 2023

I've been seeing this for weeks. Pick any block, and you will see these strange transactions. Many of them are not BRC-20 tokens, some shenanigans going on.

Look at this one: https://ordpool.space/tx/a0338a627a1e04edc190ad90fd242eecc332a047ca7b526f1f8bb191fec57725

Paid almost 20% of the toral btc sent, in fees. This doesn't make any sense. This type of tx are in every block, non stop. The UTXOs are so small it can't be coinjoins either.

109 sats \ 0 replies \ @OT 18 Nov 2023

You'd have to look into how ordinals/BRC20 mints work to understand. That's not something I personally have time for.