I've been thinking about what to do with dust recently. Some exchanges offer a clean up service, yet many of them also have minuses that make their exchanges unappealing overall. The CEX I use, Coinbase, doesn't have this service at all. This reply from them  is not encouraging -- send to a random wallet (with unstated fees -- what the?), forfeit it (how?) or buy more. Always with the buy more -- ugh. Donating isn't available anymore, so I'm stuck. Once upon a time, there were nonprofits and apps that cleaned up your dust, such as dust-aid and dustapp.io. They are no more, and the problem of dust remains.

Newbies may be wondering, "What is this dust? How do I get it?" Dust is the low-value residual balances that costs too much in transaction fees to send elsewhere ($10 to send 1 cent for example). Dust is usually worth little, but it is always worth little compared to the transmission fee of that coin. You accumulate dust through converting one coin to another coin or moving it around; if you've been in crypto more than a few months, you've got dust.

No, this is not a huge problem. However, it's annoying, and to those of us who like things organized, it's enough to niggle away at your sanity. In Coinbase at least, you can't even hide balances of any amount. It's always there, staring at you, taunting you with its annoying existence.

So how do CEX's handle dust removal? When those few CEX's vacuum up your dust, they move it out of your wallet to one of their large collector accounts; they're not actually sending it across the network. Custodial or hardware wallets don't have access to something like this; they have to send the crypto across the network. Thus their higher transmission fees and why dust tends to add up in custodial wallets even more than in exchange wallets.

Taking a different tack, I was looking at Ethereum gas fees recently. It's really inexpensive to move around small bits of it now. Someone else also pointed out that low gas fees are a precursor to bull markets. So maybe dust cleanup is only viable right before a bull market and during one? That's a weird thing. Getting rid of the cruft is only economically viable when people have enough confidence in their coin's value, apparently. Maybe we'll see vacuuming apps or services sprout up again.

Perhaps dust is an natural result of using crypto. Not every exchange allows the complete conversion of one coin to another, and so residuals often result. Moving crypto around produces dust because doing so isn't costless, and it isn't free because of its trustless nature. Sending crypto is much like traveling in 1700's England was, where you had to pay for each leg of the journey. That cost-per-leg analogy made me think, though. What if we could eliminate dust at the source?

Thinking about how civilizations grew (or if you've played any of the Civilization series), reminds you that not every expedition a country sent out was successful. Some were killed by natives; others died from diseases [Oregon trail pic]. We could implement this concept in crypto transactions. If you don't have enough crypto to complete a send, you could send a "failed expedition" that allows a transaction to go as far as it can go, expending all of the residual coins to pay for each validation hop. This would allow some income to go to the validators while also depleting the the sender's unwanted currency. Why not compensate the validators even if the transaction is doomed to never complete?

Now if such coins existed, would the CEXs carry them? No residuals, no secret party fund. Seriously, they must be doing something with all those tiny amounts. It's crypto, so someone is benefiting from the dust, somehow. It's sure not me.

This concludes my ruminations on dust. There is no quiz. See you next time! (All art by me except for the Oregon Trail one, which I found through searching for the game).