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Bitcoin Dust
212 sats \ 10 comments \ @BitBit 2 Dec 2023 bitcoin
Honest question: as the transaction fees of Bitcoin continue to rise, is it possible that eventually larger amounts of BTC become "dust"?
Will there come a time when, say, 1 BTC becomes unspendable because the transaction fees cost more than 1 BTC itself?
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30 sats \ 1 reply \ @antic 2 Dec 2023 freebie
If it got even close to that, transactions would dry up, thereby bringing the load on the mempool down. It’s theoretically possible that this happens in a very short time window but economically managed through supply and demand of mempool and txn space. Additionally, even dust can be insisted by grouping transactions.
So there’s an interesting future potential where 99% of transactions are grouped transactions and dust doesn’t matter because there will be services to help collect it back up and distribute over lightning. Miners could even provide this as a service.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @elvismercury 2 Dec 2023
So there’s an interesting future potential where 99% of transactions are grouped transactions and dust doesn’t matter because there will be services to help collect it back up and distribute over lightning. Miners could even provide this as a service.
Can you elaborate about this?
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0 sats \ 5 replies \ @elvismercury 2 Dec 2023
It's not only possible, it's inevitable that the definition of dust migrates upward. How far it migrates will depend on lots of things.
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228 sats \ 4 replies \ @antic 2 Dec 2023 freebie
How far it migrates only depends on the sat/vB market rate for transactions. If the market can’t (or refuses to) support the rate, the rate will drop.
Regarding batching dust: this is already being done today. People consolidate small UTXOs into a bigger single UTXO (no longer dust) and spend the fee from a non-dust address. I could see a future where onchain transactions are mostly lightning channel open/close transactions (batched) and if fees became too high on chain, a new business could form where a big miner like F2 or ANT could offer to sweep dust keys onto lightning by processing 1000 customers in one transaction and consolidating that into an address they control while following up with distributions of dust to customer lightning wallets. The reason I’d suggest a miner offering that is because they could pay whatever fee they want to themselves and eat it as part of the course of business. Example: if you have an address that has 1000 sats, a miner could have you either upload your private key (not a great solution) or have you do a co-sign on a big transaction with a bunch of other signers (better though harder to coordinate). They then pay a fee to group the UTXOs and pay you out 900-950 sats to your lightning address.
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100 sats \ 3 replies \ @elvismercury 2 Dec 2023
How far it migrates only depends on the sat/vB market rate for transactions.
A powerful lot of work being done there, with the word only. If you have an insight into the future of the market rate for transactions, whose inputs are a function of everything going on in the world, you are a vastly smarter man than I.
The reason I’d suggest a miner offering that is because they could pay whatever fee they want to themselves and eat it as part of the course of business.
It seems like you're talking about what amounts to a secondary market layer at work with miners: there's the math of literal on-chain transacting, in which certain UTXOs aren't viable to spend due to dust dynamics; and then there's an overlay market where people pay miners out of band, somehow, to consolidate dust in some systematic way? Is that right?
If so, I've concluded something similar, sans details. It's inevitable, I believe, that btc will be an element (perhaps a principal element) in a larger financial ecology -- it will be a layer, in other words. But there will be other layers, and the interactions between them will be complex, as systems always are. The mining dynamics you describe (or rather, that I am construing you as having described) would be one such potential dynamic.
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228 sats \ 2 replies \ @antic 2 Dec 2023
I am greatly simplifying and reducing the complexity of everything happening in the world that can and will affect Bitcoin to get to the meat of calculating the current market rate for processing transactions. Luckily, the economics at this layer can be reduced to simple supply and demand—even if chaotic elements abound in the greater ecosystem. So while things like Ordinals can add demand, it still reduces the answer to this: the cost of a bitcoin transaction is whatever the market is able and willing to pay for the limited and prioritized space in blocks at any given time.
It’s entirely possible that demand will stay high for a long time, and rates could maintain 50+sat/vB or higher, but there’s a natural redistribution of those fees into consolidated miner payout UTXOs that then get sold into the market and then a reprocessing of those UTXOs by miners to mine blocks (paid for by the market). If the market is unable or unwilling to pay, mempool space clears and fees drop. This has happened several times in the history of mining already.
This does bring up an interesting attack vector though regarding censorship. If a powerhouse like the NSA moved quickly enough before lightning network really gains popularity, they could eat the cost (printed money) to inflate the mempool with high fee transactions in order to choke out smaller paying transactions (weaker currency holders in developing nations). However, this would be quite costly to maintain over time and ultimately I think the market would mitigate high fees with the kind of consolidation market behavior I described. Still fun to think about how a massive nation with imaginary money could try to attack it :)
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100 sats \ 1 reply \ @elvismercury 2 Dec 2023
Let me put it another way. I believe there may be a scenario where:
  • the demand for block space is really high
  • the cost to transact is therefore really high
  • UTXOs that are now clearly not dust are rendered, by those conditions, into dust
In other words: the market is operating just fine, btc is alive and well, and due to demand for blockspace my $100 in btc is now unspendable except by some potential extra-market mechanisms, as discussed earlier. There's no way for my $100 UTXO to be consolidated because it's un-economical for ant miner to include it, non-chain arrangements notwithstanding.
It seems like you don't think this scenario is possible, but I'm still not making the connection as to why.
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228 sats \ 0 replies \ @antic 2 Dec 2023
We have reached alignment with one clarification: it could be economical for a miner to include your UTXO if you are willing to spend up to 100% of the chain value as a fee (as we discussed, strange new markets could emerge) :)
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0 sats \ 1 reply \ @Zepasta 2 Dec 2023 freebie
Another copy-pasta bot: https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/187yijc/bitcoin_dust/
@antic @elvismercury i'm gonna tag you guys, flag & mute this retard @BitBit every post of his is copy-pasta from reddit content.