Feed for tag: transaction-fees
Predictive UTXO Management

Dmitry Petukhov presents a different approach to the UTXO consolidation problem called Organic Consolidation.

For UTXO-based cryptocurrencies, it is important to have the set of managed Unspent Transaction Outputs in optimal shape, because if you have too much small UTXO, you will have to create bigger transactions to send the same amount of funds, and hence pay bigger network fee, or even need to send several transactions to transfer the needed amount.

Typical approach to handle this is to do periodical sweep of UTXO, bundling them all together, at the time when network fee is low.

We implemented another approach, that does not require manual UTXO consolidation, and at the same time, conserves network fee - when fee in the network is high, the algorithm tries to use less UTXO per transaction, and when network fee is low, it will create bigger transaction, effectively performing UTXO consolidation along with regular payments. This organic UTXO consolidation allows to maintain healthy UTXO set automatically, without manual consolidation runs.

Consolidating Transaction Output

Prior to SegWit, when blocks were at their transaction maximum and major wallets were not transaction batching, many wallets were generated and discarded with minuscule sums. In the Bitcoin source code, these balances are referred to as “dust” (the following comment is adjusted for formatting):

“Dust” is defined in terms of dustRelayFee, which has units satoshis-per-kilobyte. If you’d pay more in fees than the value of the output to spend something, then we consider it dust.

A Look at Transaction Fees
A discussion was started on Reddit’s /r/BitcoinDiscussion that initially wanted to look into the possibility of spam transactions. Much discussion occurred regarding the topic as it is highly debatable. However, out of the discussion one redditor put a quick project together to collect some fee statistics from recent Bitcoin blocks.