Replying to Avatar Blazar

Listening to nostr:npub1cj8znuztfqkvq89pl8hceph0svvvqk0qay6nydgk9uyq7fhpfsgsqwrz4u podcasting about security and hardware wallets…what is meant by “most people will not be able to own a UTXO”?? #asknostr #lowtechpleb

Two aspects: The number of utxos the system can support is not infinite; to verify each of the 1000s of transactions in each block, you have to check all the inputs are not already spent, which means you need fast access to *all* the utxos that currently exist. At currently 1-200M utxos, this is already quite a task. The earth's population is more like 8 billion.

But the other argument/aspect is economic : if everyone owned utxos, it could means that funding them and spending them requires block space in huge competition... costs of txs would spike way beyond the reach of the average person.

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The reason why base layer bitcoin is such a small, constrained database system is because it, uniquely, requires *every* participant to know and verify *everything*, so you can't split up workload.

Okay I can grasp that, but isn’t even a $10 buy of BTC considered a utxo?

Yes. In 15 years though, a $10 utxo might be completely uneconomic, if it costs more than $10 in fees to ever spend it.

Bitcoin fees effectively depend on how many inputs there are**. Each utxo being spent is an input.

** outputs cost too; it's basically the total amounts of data, in bytes, that you're paying for.

🧐…ok. I was halfway there so thank you 🙏 for taking a moment to explain that.