Dust

Created by: davidlatapie

For Moneropedia entry

Dust is a generic term given to amount of XMR so low that

1. they have no meaningful value
2. they are very expensive to spend (the transaction fees may be 50% or even 200% of the dust itself)

The dangers of dust

The dust issue happens in every cryptocurrency and can be used as an attack vector, to bloat the blockchain (much like many 20 bytes files on a file system can bloat a filesystem by using many more clusters than necessary). Dust issue can be mitigated with smart fine-tuning. In the case of Monero, the original pool software had too low a threshold for payment, resulting on a lot of dust. Later, an dust attack was even perpetrated.

The solution to dust

MRL-0004 implements a solution for dealing with dust in an elegant way: new outputting rules. "No new dust will be created in the system, and dust will only be removed from the system over time"