Today I Learned about the Dust Threshold

As I was browsing the Trending section, I stumbled upon a post proposing to make spam less profitable in an attempt to reduce spamming on the Steem blockchain. The gist of the said post (to which you can read here: Proposal to make spam less profitable was to increase the current dust threshold to at least $0.1 or even higher.

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But what exactly does Dust Threshold mean?

Simply speaking, the term Dust is often used to describe a small transaction that might be considered spammy to the network and a threshold is put into place to discourage people transacting the minimum. A somewhat perfect example of this is Bitcoin transactions, wherein they will require you to pay a small amount of Satoshis if you send in below the recommended one.

Today I learned that Steem also has this dust threshold,

Currently if a post/comment earns 0.001 to 0.019 SBD worth of rewards - this is rounded down to 0.00. If a post/comment earns at least 0.02 SBD - then they receive their reward.

You read that one right, after seven days of waiting, If your post or comment earns below $0.02 it will be rounded down to $0 and you will absolutely get nothing in return. Nada! The SBD/Steem author-curators calculation only happens whenever it reaches the minimum or above $0.02 at the current payout.

As proof of that, the author of the said post also posted github codes to backed this one:

Setting of $0.020:

https://github.com/steemit/steem/blob/master/libraries/protocol/include/steem/protocol/config.hpp

#define STEEMMINPAYOUT_SBD (asset(20,SBD_SYMBOL))

https://github.com/steemit/steem/blob/master/libraries/chain/include/steem/chain/util/reward.hpp

inline bool is_comment_payout_dust( const price& p, uint64_t steem_payout ){
return to_sbd( p, asset( steem_payout, STEEM_SYMBOL ) ) < STEEM_MIN_PAYOUT_SBD;
}

My personal thoughts:

As someone whose 100% upvote weight doesn't reach the minimum $0.02 even at 100% VP (currently at $0.016), this is somewhat disheartening to know. I often upvote any decent comment I got in every blog post I make, to thank my followers and encourage them to comment in every post I make. But knowing that after 7days, those measly $0.01 are being rounded down to $0 is just not acceptable. Sure it will greatly reduce the number of spammers but it will also hinder almost every "little fishes" who have no friends or connections on this platform. I do hope they find a more suitable way on how to this problem though.

This is my first time posting via steemgigs. If all goes well, I might as well try doing this TIL thing once a week.

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