What is a Dust transaction?

1 February, 2019

Medium min reading

What is a dust transaction in bitcoin, definition of transaction dust, transaction dust in Spanish, explanation of transaction dust cryptocurrencies

The English word dust, literally translated as dust. But the appearance of Bitcoin originated a new meaning for the term. The community uses the noun dust to refer to transactions seen as spam within the Bitcoin network. It refers to a measure that helps protect the network from very small transactions that may compromise its stability and operation. In this situation you can surely ask yourself, if it is impossible to process then why does it exist? What implications does it have? In this article we will examine these and many other questions.

Origin of the Dust

During the creation of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto was able to foresee situations on the network in order to protect it from DoS attacks and spam. This was how he introduced a series of measures to avoid this situation. This is the reason why the payment fees. Commissions that users pay to use the network in order to incentivize the work of miners.

Among these protections, there was one in particular that took care that the transactions were large enough to guarantee the payment of the transmission and verification fee in the network. This was the first protection against dust in Bitcoin. In the source code Released by Nakamoto, within the main function of Bitcoin, were the function GetMinFee. This function is responsible for ensuring the minimum fees for each transaction. In the code as a note of its operation, Nakamoto commented:

Transaction fee requirements, only primarily necessary to control overflow. Below 10K (about 80 entries) is free for the first 100 transactions. The base rate is 0.01 per KB.

Satoshi Nakamoto

Original source code of Bitcoin - 2009

Since then, one of the developers' concerns has been to guarantee that Transactions in the network they can be as small as possible, without this threatening the stability of the network. This is intended to allow Bitcoin users to make micropayments, without having to spend more on transaction fees than on micropayment as such. A situation that has not always been very successful. Hence, to resolve it, options such as lightning Network o followed.

Blockchain reminder: transactions

When we make one transaction en Bitcoin or in any other cryptocurrency, its authenticity needs to be validated. In this way, the network ensures that the transaction is valid and that it is processed reasonably. Those responsible for this are the miners or the network participants (in case of networks PoS, DPoS o POA). They are paid a small fee (transaction fee) for the work of validating the transaction made.

But due to the blockchain working mechanism, there are times when the mining fee may be higher than the actual amount of the transaction. This is related to the concept of inflation. And is that, if there is a high demand for transactions, and there is little capacity to meet it, the transaction fee increases. This is caused, because the miners will request a higher payment to prioritize and attend to the transactions quickly.

Evolution of the dust concept in Bitcoin

April 8th 2013

Gregory Maxwell adjusts the transaction fee to make it more equitable.

One of the first changes to his concept was introduced by Bitcoin Core, the base development of Bitcoin crypto wallets. In April 2013, Gregory Maxwell introduced this improvement, which sought to make the transaction fee more realistic with the economic reality of Bitcoin.

April 24th 2013

Readjustment of dust concept

Later by using a BIP , in question the BIP-0070 framed in the creation of a new payment protocol, dust protection received another new improvement. Gavin andresen, was the developer of the update, in August 2013. With this new modification, a whole new more elaborate function was generated to guarantee that dust will not be sent to the network. In his own words, Andresen explains that:

Replace the validation check for "amount == 0" with an isDust check, so small amounts of output are caught before the wallet is unlocked, a transaction is created, etc.

Gavin andressen

Reject dust quantities during validation - August 2013

This new function created by Andresen would become a widely adopted standard. Especially since it gives great flexibility when creating interfaces for cryptocurrency graphics. In addition, the new function would automatically manage what is considered a transaction dust within the network. With these programming changes, better security and stability for the network is promoted.

17th September 2013

Free outbound transaction rule removal

Again is Gavin Andresen who introduces a modification. It is a old rule that affected relay /mempool of the Bitcoin network. Until then, they had the ability to output only major transactions which 0.01 BTC. The removal of this limitation was made thanks to the changes to dynamically calculate what is dust within the network.

July 19, 2017

Redefinition of the Dust

Alex morcos, a Bitcoin development contributor, introduced a series of cambios to redefine the concept of dust. In these changes, he commented the following:

This redefines dust as the value of an output, so that it would cost that same value in commissions to (create and) spend the amount of output at the rate of dust transmission. The previous definition was that it would cost 1/3 of the value. The default dust rate is increased to 3000 sat / kB, so the actual default dust output value of 546 satoshis for a non-SegWit output remains unchanged.

This commitment is only a redesign, unless a dustrelayfee from the command line, in which case that number will now need to be increased by a factor of 3 to be able to behave in the same way. -dustrelayfee it is a hidden command line option.

Alex morcos

Redefinition of Dust

With this latest modification, the Bitcoin Core team took the latest modification to the concept of dust for granted.

Author

Washington Gomez

CISO (Chief Information Security Officer)

Washington Gómez is an information security professional with extensive experience in the field of Information Technology and Security. He currently serves as a CISO at Bit2Me.