Bitcoin isn't without its irritating kinks, and tiny bitcoin pieces called "dust" are among the lesser-known. As the analogy above shows, the bitcoin protocol sometimes needs to generate tiny output coins when users send bitcoin back and forth, coins so small in value they require more fees to spend than they're actually worth.
But since blockchain room is limited and small value transactions, say $0.01, still can often take up just as much room as larger transactions, too many of these tinier coin pieces can lead to performance issues in the system as a whole.
In the past, dust wasn't necessarily problem for bitcoin users. The story changed, however, as fees grew higher than ever late last year, making smaller value transactions much more expensive to send. In short, some developers argue the time is ripe to get rid of bitcoin dust now that fees are down again.
To get rid of this "dust," users need to "consolidate" their all their dust "transaction outputs" into one. That just means sending one transaction that effectively lumps them together.
Going back to our original analogy, it's similar to trading in a bunch of pennies, nickels and dimes for a fresh dollar bill. How (and whether) users can identify and get rid of dust, depends on their wallet, however.
Slepak recommends Electrum, a long-standing simplified payment verification (SPV) wallet, that validates transactions with less data, and is thus common to use on mobile devices.
A user can select a number of "change addresses" holding dust, then select the "send from" button to create one transaction consolidating all these little dust particles into a single transaction output.
Some wallets might not offer this granular level of control, especially if they're custodial wallets like Coinbase, which essentially manage these sort of details themselves behind the scenes - choosing whether to keep or get rid of dust.
Bitcoin wallet Blockchain and offers a variation of this feature as well.
Decentralized applications developer Greg Slepak, like many others in the space, is thinking ahead to a time where bitcoin adoption and transaction rates increase - something that might or might not happen.
If that does happen, the argument goes, it's more profitable to move these tiny data pieces while fees are relatively low, especially if a user has collected a lot of them.
Slepak, for one, isn't about to take any chances.
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