Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Dust death of Bitcoin?
by
Blinken
on 22/11/2017, 13:57:47 UTC
It seems that when transactions occur the outputs only get smaller and are never aggregated. That can't end well.

For example, let's say that address A has an output with 1 BTC and address B has an output of 1.5 BTC and both send 0.5 BTC to address X. In this case X now has 2 unspent outputs of 0.5. They are not aggregated, but are treated separately. So, for example, if X wants to send 0.75 BTC to address Y, then output 1 might be sent to Y and also 0.25 of output 2, while 0.24 is sent to a change address and 0.01 is left as a fee. So, a total of 0.75 BTC is sent to Y, but it is still divided into 2 outputs. Also, the fee is problematical because they are relatively small. The miners collect thousands of small dollar fee outputs, but there is no way to aggregate them, so they are stuck with thousands of tiny little outputs.

This would suggest that eventually Bitcoin will experience a "dust death" because the outputs will just keep getting divided into smaller and smaller outputs until it becomes impractical to transact them. Is this correct?