What is "Dust" in a Wallet?

Dust is the term used to denote one or more very small pieces of a cryptocurrency, like Bitcoin or Safex Cash.

Let’s say your Bitcoin wallet has 20,000 satoshis (sats) as a balance. It could be a single 20k sat piece of a single BTC, or lots of very small pieces of many different bitcoins that together amount to the 20k sat balance. The total looks the same to the wallet observer, but how the blockchain handles their transfer is different.

When you transfer coins, each output being used in the transaction needs to be identified. The identification process takes up data. The more data needed in the transaction, the higher the transaction fee.

In some instances, the amount of data needed to identify all the pieces of dust in a desired transaction actually exceeds the maximum transaction size for the blockchain’s block size, and the transaction will fail to process.

With Bitcoin, this can be problematic, as you can be left with a pile of dust in your wallet that is difficult to use.

With Safex Cash, it is less of an issue because Safex Blockchain uses the CryptoNote protocol for identifying outputs in your wallet. If you do end up with some dust or other accumulation of very small outputs in your wallet (eg. you left your mining pool payout set to 2 SFX and you ended up with thousands of 2 SFX outputs in your wallet), then you can simply send your entire balance to yourself (same public address), and all those small outputs will get converted into larger, more easy to use outputs. (It will cost you some SFX in transaction fees to perform this output ''amalgamation'').

The Safex Wallet will also create as many transactions as is needed to perform the output upgrade, from just the single transaction Send request.