Disposing of "dust attack" UTXOs

0xB10C · January 30, 2026, 6:15pm

I’m not aware of anyone looking into it, no. Congratulations, you are now the person looking into it!

You can use the dumptxoutset RPC and e.g. this script

contrib/utxo-tools/utxo_to_sqlite.py

01651324f

#!/usr/bin/env python3
# Copyright (c) 2024-present The Bitcoin Core developers
# Distributed under the MIT software license, see the accompanying
# file COPYING or http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php.
"""Tool to convert a compact-serialized UTXO set to a SQLite3 database.

The input UTXO set can be generated by Bitcoin Core with the `dumptxoutset` RPC:
$ bitcoin-cli dumptxoutset ~/utxos.dat latest

The created database contains a table `utxos` with the following schema:
(txid TEXT, vout INT, value INT, coinbase INT, height INT, scriptpubkey TEXT)
"""
import argparse
import os
import sqlite3
import sys
import time


UTXO_DUMP_MAGIC = b'utxo\xff'

This file has been truncated. show original

to export the current UTXO set. From there, it’s probably just a few SQL queries to figure out how many close-to-dust UTXOs remain and when they were created.

There is also a PR for a utxo to CSV script open. If you end up using it, feedback on the PR is surely welcome.