Coin selection
Coin selection is the method a wallet uses to choose which of its UTXOs to spend in a particular transaction.
Most early Bitcoin wallets implemented relatively simple coin selection strategies, such as spending UTXOs in the order they were received (first-in, first-out), but as fees have become more of a concern, some wallets have switched to more advanced algorithms that try to minimize transaction size.
Coin selection strategies can also be used to improve onchain privacy by trying to avoid the use of UTXOs associated with previous transactions in later unrelated transactions.
Optech newsletter and website mentions
2024
- BDK #1581 allows a customizable fallback algorithm in branch-and-bound coin selection
- Effect of SubtractFeeFromOutputs on coin selection in Bitcoin Core
- Notes from Bitcoin developer discussion about coin selection
- LND #8515 updates multiple RPCs to accept the name of the coin selection strategy to be used
- LND #8378 makes several improvements to LND’s coin selection features
- New coin selection strategy for LN liquidity providers
- Bitcoin Core #27877 updates Bitcoin Core’s wallet with CoinGrinder coin selection strategy
- New coin selection strategies proposed and tested for Bitcoin Core
2023
- Bitcoin Core #26152 now pays any fee deficit for unconfirmed outputs chosen by coin selection
- Bitcoin Core #27021 adds interface for calculating an output’s ancestor fee deficit
- BTCPay Server #4600 updates its coin selection to avoid unnecessary inputs for payjoin
2022
- Bitcoin Core #24584 prefers input sets composed of a single output type for privacy
- What is the coin selection ‘waste metric’?
2021
- Bitcoin Core #17526 adds Single Random Draw coin selection algorithm
- Bitcoin Core #22009 introduces new heuristic to compare the effectiveness of coin selection results
2019
- Bitcoin Core PR#17290 coin selection for customized transactions
- Bitcoin Core 0.19 adds wallet flag to avoid address reuse privacy loss
- Bitcoin Core PR#13756 adds flag to avoid address reuse privacy loss
2018
- Bitcoin Core unlikely to add coin selection RPC
- Coin selection groups for privacy and consolidation
- Coin selection simulations
See also
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