This isn't the type of question that will have a definitive answer and the future of bitcoin value relative to goods has an impact on the answer. Other things to consider are transaction fees and privacy.
My thought is that it makes sense to have different size UTXOs of course. You don't want one big one or many tiny ones. But what do you think is the smallest you should have?
My current thinking is around 100k sats. If you have smaller UTXOs now is a good time to move them on to lightning via a swap service. Am I wrong? What do you think?
148 sats \ 2 replies \ @OT 28 Feb
Its hard to know. People freaking out about fees (I'm one of them!) can't really say that we're going to have a dead mempool again.
100k sats for this epoch sounds about right, but long term I think 1 million sats should be good standard to go by.
Lightning and other L2's are not ready for mass adoption yet. A lot of OG bitcoiners only transact on chain so it will take time for them to move up a layer or 2.
Then there's the whole issue of consolidating UTXO's and sacrificing privacy which is not ideal either.
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This is exactly the thought process I have been going through.
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15 sats \ 0 replies \ @OT 28 Feb
At the moment when buying something on chain and the change is small, I line it up with a LN swap or liquid peg in. That way I'm avoiding future onchain dust.
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124 sats \ 8 replies \ @joda 28 Feb
Bitcoin Audible has a recent episode something like "to dust you shall return" where he talks about this. IIRC he said 100k or so is pretty good. I've heard others who consolidate to 500k or so.
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Here is the source article
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This is the way!
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If you ever use Bitcoin as a currency you'll have change/dust and UTXOs way smaller than that.
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The assumption is no transactions will use L1 as "currency" -- it will be Lightning. So you might have a 1M channel transaction on chain with no change.
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In the future yes. In the last decade and currently now there are many businesses that only accept Bitcoin on the chain.
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If you are spending on-chain, then you want to keep your UTXOs small for privacy and safety.
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Thanks, I need to check that out. This type of stuff is interesting to me.
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Jameson Lopp had an intresting post in this context about Economically Unspendable Bitcoin UTXOs Also great comments in UTXO set & consolidation
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Excellent video
There is no perfect answer for UTXO
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Thanks trying to consolidate 50 UTXO’s now with Multi-signature
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1M sats…and even then, I think that is kinda small. 10M or 1 BTC is probably safer
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1,000,000 sats is my jam too. In a high fee environment that'd be reasonable to send from cold storage to a LNwallet.
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I try to do 200k and up
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Any reason why you pick that amount?
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No real reason in particular. I recently consolidated a ton of UTXOS and spent over 300k sats in doing it. I figured at 200k the amount of inputs shouldn’t be too large that would price me out of sending a transaction but if fees stay high for a long time then this could be very wrong
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I try to stick to 1M, but usually end up with quite a few 100ks.
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Typically in investing you like to keep your annual fees under 1%.
Picking 5 year average hold time means you'd be willing to pay 0.2% fees on an utxo.
The current feerate is 43 sat/vB which works out to 10k sats or a minimum utxo size of 5 million sats => 0.05 btc.
Here it pays to watch the fee market and consolidate utxos when this 0.2% threshold is hit.
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1 - 2 million sats feels reasonable.
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  • If Bitcoin becomes the measure of value then mempool fees will reduce.
  • If the amount of transactions is high then fees will be high to grab more sats
  • if the fees are too high people will use L2 to settle and miners will reduce fees to encourage on chain transactions
  • big miners may go out of business and small miners will settle transactions but no one will know who actually solved the reward so fees will just be fees.
  • Fediment might be something but lightning makes the mSats useless with high fees..
  • People will figure a way to harness on chain and create a paper currency that is attached to UTXOs. The minute the supply changes the currency will die so no one will fuck with the UTXOs
  • People might not settle transactions anymore so miners will pay you to settle so that they can get paid by the power company to make sure the grid works and the heat stays on or the refrigerator that has the coolant heated by ASICS...
PLEASE EXPAND!
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500 bucks maybe 1000 according to Andreas Antonop
Whatever that translates to Satoshi
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based on straight nut n' gut...a million sats
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Thanks for sharing. I’m actually planning to go the opposite route as I have 50 UTXO’s and looking to consolidate all to one as I’m a DCA value HODLer mostly. I’ll add more smaller in the future, but don’t want them trapped in my multi sig with fees.
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