On Fri, Aug 20, 2021, 06:52 Jeremy via bitcoin-dev <bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
one interesting point that came up at the bitdevs in austin today that favors remove that i believe is new to this discussion (it was new to me):

the argument can be reduced to:

- dust limit is a per-node relay policy.
- it is rational for miners to mine dust outputs given their cost of maintenance (storing the output potentially forever) is lower than their immediate reward in fees.
-Here, u  r assuming miners not running full nodes, or even stateless nodes as in Utreexo
-otherwise they suffer from storing dust UTXOS/their effect on proof length, right?

- if txn relaying nodes censor something that a miner would mine, users will seek a private/direct relay to the miner and vice versa.
- if direct relay to miner becomes popular, it is both bad for privacy and decentralization.
- therefore the dust limit, should there be demand to create dust at prevailing mempool feerates, causes an incentive to increase network centralization (immediately)

the tradeoff is if a short term immediate incentive to promote network centralization is better or worse than a long term node operator overhead.


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my take is that:

1) having a dust limit is worse since we'd rather not have an incentive to produce or roll out centralizing software, whereas not having a dust limit creates an mild incentive for node operators to improve utreexo decentralizing software.
Why not having dust limit improves Utreexo, I think (and tried to suggest many times) separate storing of dust&other non spendable UTXOS (and their hashes) so that they do not affect other UTXOS proofs ( and not brought into main memory unless called as a TXO)

2) it's hard to quantify the magnitude of the incentives, which does matter.
I honestly don't get the long term perspective of miners Incentivised to storing small dust UTXOS instead of having their values added to the fee.
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