one interesting point that came up at the bitdevs in austin today that favors remove that i believe is new to this discussion (it was new to me): the argument can be reduced to: - dust limit is a per-node relay policy. - it is rational for miners to mine dust outputs given their cost of maintenance (storing the output potentially forever) is lower than their immediate reward in fees. - if txn relaying nodes censor something that a miner would mine, users will seek a private/direct relay to the miner and vice versa. - if direct relay to miner becomes popular, it is both bad for privacy and decentralization. - therefore the dust limit, should there be demand to create dust at prevailing mempool feerates, causes an incentive to increase network centralization (immediately) the tradeoff is if a short term immediate incentive to promote network centralization is better or worse than a long term node operator overhead. /////////////////// my take is that: 1) having a dust limit is worse since we'd rather not have an incentive to produce or roll out centralizing software, whereas not having a dust limit creates an mild incentive for node operators to improve utreexo decentralizing software. 2) it's hard to quantify the magnitude of the incentives, which does matter.