What is the 'dust' transaction?

darkFunction

Yesterday I sent 100 SC to an address in my wallet, waited for blockchain sync and confirmation, and verified using siac wallet balance that the wallet's balance is indeed 100 coins.

I checked again today, but see that the wallet now contains 99.97 SC. Listing the transactions shows this one

51890 eca0c49bc2ec65ad4c1cc87927e583f8f5133be23ec948b0c11780339c452b4b -0.03 SC

http://explore.sia.tech/hash.html?hash=eca0c49bc2ec65ad4c1cc87927e583f8f5133be23ec948b0c11780339c452b4b

Would somebody be able to explain what the purpose of the 'dust' transaction is? And what the arbitrary data sent along with it means?

Thanks a lot. Also it's nice to see Sia getting a bit more recognition, I see the devs have been putting in serious hours. Don't burn yourselves out guys ;)

in-cred-u-lous

I assume "dust" in Sia is the same as bitcoin:

From the bitcoin source:

// "Dust" is defined in terms of CTransaction::minRelayTxFee,
// which has units satoshis-per-kilobyte.
// If you'd pay more than 1/3 in fees
// to spend something, then we consider it dust.
// A typical txout is 34 bytes big, and will
// need a CTxIn of at least 148 bytes to spend:
// so dust is a txout less than 546 satoshis 
// with default minRelayTxFee.

i.e. "dust" are small transactions considered "uneconomical" due to network fees.

darkFunction

I see. I hadn't attempted to spend any coins though, it seems as though it's happening repeatedly, maybe every day. I've not touched the wallet for two days but another transaction just left:

alt text

The initial transaction was 110 coins inbound, with a tx fee of 10 coins.

in-cred-u-lous

Are you running a host? If so, the host module will spend some coins for collateral and announcing itself on the network. Besides that, running the renter and uploading files will obviously spend coins too.

darkFunction

No. I'm just running vanilla siad so I could use the wallet. I haven't configured a host.

in-cred-u-lous

Ok. Then I have no clue what those transactions are. Odd, I would say. Maybe @Taek has an explanation.

Taek

It looks like the dust output was actually used for miner fees, and that the miner fees just aren't being correctly reported by the explorer.

The transaction is probably a host announcement.

darkFunction

OK. Cheers guys!

What is the 'dust' transaction? browsing