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MRL-0004 talks about how if I get sent a weird amount of XMR like 103.32111111, I'll have a weird output of .00111111 in my wallet, and assuming there will be no other outputs of the same amount in the blockchain, it's not possible to mix this output, and if I spend it, everyone will be able to link those two transactions.

But when I look at real transactions like this one, the weird amounts seem to be getting broken into many outputs and I don't see any dust output being created.

What's going on here? When do I need to do something about dust in my wallet?

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The behavior in the transaction you linked is a new one. It did not exist at the time MRL-0004 was written.

Now, if you make a transaction now including your 0.00111111 output, it will appear as is as an input to that transaction (and you may have to send it with mixin 0, unless there are two other outputs of that size on the blockchain already). However, should this transaction pay out some dusty amount like 3.32111111, this amount will be decomposed. This behavior has been current since last fork in march 2016.

So if you have dust, you can either spend it with mixin 0 (current simplewallet has a sweep_unmixable command for this), or wait to spend it later. Note that dusty amounts might be mixable. For instance, if several people send an integer amount of monero, and the transfer had to be split into 3 different transactions, all would generate a 0.003333333333 monero output, so that particular amount is likely to have been created several times before that fork.

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  • I understand, thank you. So in that case even if I happen to have dust from before that fork, I have nothing to worry about since if it can't be mixed, the wallet will give me an error and I'll have to use sweep_unmixable, which will create the smaller outputs for me, right?
    – mwdddgcs
    Commented Aug 18, 2016 at 8:58
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    sweep_unmixable will try to send all the outputs in your wallet that cannot be mixed with others. Note that such outputs tend to be small, and if you happen to have only very small ones, it may be that they can't "pay for themselves", since Monero's fees as per kilobyte. You could get that with many outputs below 0.001 monero or so.
    – user36303
    Commented Aug 18, 2016 at 10:37

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