Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: WARNING! Bitcoin will soon block small transaction outputs
by
scintill
on 19/05/2013, 00:36:03 UTC
Who decides what a transaction is worth? Value is subjective, and even if you can't think of a reason why someone might be willing to pay a lot to send a transaction that doesn't mean they don't exist.

By "amounts so small it costs more to spend them than they are worth" I mean it costs more BTC in fees to re-spend than the mathematical value of the output*.  In other words, there is no economic reason to ever spend that output, unless the fees model changes or you manage to spend it without a fee.  It's like seeing a penny on the ground and knowing it will cost 10 cents worth of food to "pay" for the energy expended reaching down and picking it up (probably exaggeration, of course.)  What economic motivation is there to do that?  In Bitcoin, miners and other full nodes have to carry those pennies that people thought it was fun to throw around with no motivation to pick up, for the foreseeable future.  Miners have never been obligated to accept this abuse, and it's looking like many of them will put an end to it now.

Yes, I suppose sending 1 satoshi to one of Satoshi's addresses may have more subjective value to you than to the cold, hard 1-satoshi literal value.  If so, express that burning desire by paying a premium in fees and maybe someone will mine it for you.

Sorry if this feels brusque.  I find the attachment to 1-satoshi divisibility silly as it's just as arbitrary as 5430 satoshis.  I'm disappointed the network has been censoring my attempts at spending 0.1 satoshis. Wink

*By the way, if I'm understanding the 1/3 fraction in the patch, 5430-satoshi outputs are still quite uneconomical to spend.