Cryptocurrency dust
Crypto dust as a term was created by Binance exchange marketing department. It doesn’t mean crypto dust wasn’t exist before. Just before that noone knew how to call the dust in cryptocurrency.
Contents
What is crypto dust?
Cryptocurrency dust are fractional values from a unit of cryptocurrency. Such small means are usually impossible to trade because they are less than transactional fees. Being below the minimum trading limit, they usually stand idle in user wallets. Hence, the term «crypto dust». You can’t use it, until the balance of the wallet is replenished. The more wallets and tokens you have, the bigger the size of crypto dust. How it appears? When you want to make some transactions, usually it needs to be validated by miners. Miners get a mining fee for their services, and it has a wide range – from «near zero» to a very high amount. That’s why you can’t predict exact amount of spended cryptocurrency and often you have some tiny amount left.
Bitcoin dust
As higher the value of cryptocurrency, the bigger is the problem of crypto dust. So, of course, dust in bitcoin network has a very big volume. Problem become very sharp when BTC made a rally in December 2017 and fees were very high. Crypto dust in Bitcoin has two negative aspects. At first, of course, it is unprofitable for users. At second, it clutters already overloaded blockchain making it less efective and decreasing the productivity of the whole system. In case of Bitcoin as crypto dust can be considered a little amoutns of BTC, which could be transfered but it has no economic sense. The more so it is not safe and can decrease your privcay level. Bitcoin blockchain is public and all transactions could be viewed. That’s why if you have a lot of wallets and you decide to collect all your bitcoin dust to one of them, you «connect» them and everybody understands that it belongs to one person. Collecting crypto dust you deanonimized all your adresses and all your savings, which not so good.
The good news is that problem of crypto dust in Bitcoin will be reduced. New version of software, which palnned for releasing somewhere in 2019, will help with it. The new Branch and bound tech will improve current algorithm of selection of coins, which inefficiently combines parts of coins into a transaction and almost always creates «outputs for change». New one groups the data more economically both in terms of scalability and in terms of fees. It will be realised as a search through all the inputs, trying to find among them an exact number of Bitcoins that the user wants to spend.
Crypto dust and Binance exchange
As we say earlier, «crypto dust» term was created by Binance. It appears when one of the biggest cryptocurrency exchange presented their new service. The new feature introduced by Binance will allow users to turn their crypto dust into useful tokens. Binance users are able to convert crypto-assets less than 0.001 BTC to BNB tokens.
BNB tokens are internal coins of the Binance platform. They are used to paying transaction fees for all exchange and trading operations on the platform. The process of converting crypto to BNB tokens on the Binance platform is quite simple. The button «convert to BNB» was added to the control panel of the user interface. Once a user logs in to his Binance account, he can click the button and select the cryptocurrency in his account, which he wants to convert. The value of dust in BNB is displayed at the bottom of the page, along with the fee for the transaction.
The reaction on innovation in social networks and forums was mostly positive. Service was presented at the end of April 2018 and no other exchanges made the same since then.
See Also on BitcoinWiki
Sources
https://decenter.org/blockchain/449-bitcoin-dust-en
https://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-dust-tell-get-rid/
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/bitcoin-dust.asp
http://bitcoinist.com/crypto-dust-binance-convert-bnb/
https://nigeriabitcoincommunity.com/how-reuse-residual-coins-binance/