add ability to remove (dust) UTXOs #23875

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

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problem: i have a lot of 0 sat UTXOs (after flooding the testnet lol)

Describe the solution you'd like

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an rpc call to remove UTXOs for example: bitcoin-cli removeutxos with an argument to remove everything with less than the specified amount

Describe alternatives you've considered

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making a new wallet, sending coins from the old one to the new one, remove the old wallet

Additional context

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Probably better solution would be to have option to hide from UI and ignore in coin selection UTXOs below certain amount?

Even better idea that also reduces global UTXO set so is good for Bitcoin - dust-b-gone by @petertodd.

why hide them? 0 sat UTXOs cost more to spend than they have value. i mean remove them from the wallet or even put them on a list to ignore them when rescanning the blockchain. dust b gone is a nice idea but as said there it's offline

dust b gone works if the dust value is more than an input costs. Nobody is gonna pay for my 0 sat UTXOs

On Tue, Dec 28, 2021 at 10:01:46AM -0800, Antoni Spaanderman wrote:

dust b gone works if the dust value is more than an input costs. Nobody is gonna pay for my 0 sat UTXOs

Agreed. The best dust-b-gone can do in that circumstance is act as a way to let others donate money to get UTXOs removed. And I never actually implemented that.

I do think there's an unforeseen cost in storing these dust UTXOs, which might result in people willing to pay into a pot to have them cleared up - a bit like people grouping together to clean up the beaches of litter. If people didn't have to pay to pick-up their own dust, then dust-cleaning might occur more often.

@rebroad The economic way to deal with dust UTXO's would be to soft-fork in a per-UTXO storage "tax", that eventually makes a UTXO unsepndable. At that point it can be removed from the UTXO set. You can't actually recover that tax in that circumstance with a soft-fork. But that's ok - the amount of money tied up in dust UTXO's isn't very big anyway.

I'm curious what algorithms you have in mind. How would you derive the numbers used in this algorithm? ​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

On Thu, 27 Apr 2023, 01:28 Peter Todd, @.***> wrote:

@rebroad https://github.com/rebroad The economic way to deal with dust UTXO's would be to soft-fork in a per-UTXO storage "tax", that eventually makes a UTXO unsepndable. At that point it can be removed from the UTXO set. You can't actually recover that tax in that circumstance with a soft-fork. But that's ok - the amount of money tied up in dust UTXO's isn't very big anyway.

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The feature request didn't seem to attract much attention in the past. Also, the issue seems not important enough right now to keep it sitting around idle in the list of open issues.

Pull requests with improvements are always welcome.