Another coin bites the dust: An analysis of dust in UTXO based cryptocurrencies

Cristina Pérez-Solà; Sergi Delgado-Segura; Guillermo Navarro-Arribas; Jordi Herrera-Joancomart

Paper 2018/513

Another coin bites the dust: An analysis of dust in UTXO based cryptocurrencies

Cristina Pérez-Solà, Sergi Delgado-Segura, Guillermo Navarro-Arribas, and Jordi Herrera-Joancomart

Abstract

Unspent Transaction Outputs (UTXOs) are the internal mechanism used in many cryp- tocurrencies to represent coins. Such representation has some clear benefits, but also entails some complexities that, if not properly handled, may leave the system in an inefficient state. Specifically, inefficiencies arise when wallets (the software responsible for transferring coins between parties) do not manage UTXOs properly when performing payments. In this paper, we study three cryptocurrencies: Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash and Litecoin, by analyzing the actual state of their UTXO sets, that is, the status of their sets of spendable coins. These three cryptocurrencies are the top-3 UTXO based cryptocurrencies by market capitalization. Our analysis shows that the usage of each cryptocurrency is quite different, and let to different results. Furthermore, it also points out that the management of the transactions has not been always performed efficiently and then the actual state of the UTXO set for each cryptocurrency is far from ideal.

Metadata

Available format(s): PDF
Category: Applications
Publication info: Preprint. MINOR revision.
Keywords: blockchain UTXO Bitcoin
Contact author(s): guillermo navarro @ uab cat
History: 2018-11-08: revised; 2018-05-26: received; See all versions
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2018/513
License: CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2018/513,
      author = {Cristina Pérez-Solà and Sergi Delgado-Segura and Guillermo Navarro-Arribas and Jordi Herrera-Joancomart},
      title = {Another coin bites the dust: An analysis of dust in UTXO based cryptocurrencies},
      howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2018/513},
      year = {2018},
      note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/513}},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/513}
}