Self Organisation in Coin Selection
Posted on July 3, 2018The term “self organisation” refers to the emergence of complex behaviour (typically in biological systems) from simple rules and random fluctuations. In this blog post we will see how we can take advantage of self organisation to design a simple yet effective coin selection algorithm.
Coin selection is the process of selecting unspent outputs in a user’s wallet to satisfy a particular payment request (for a recap of UTxO style accounting, see section “Background: UTxO-style Accounting” of my previous blog post). As Jameson Lopp points out in his blog post The Challenges of Optimizing Unspent Output Selection, coin selection is thorny problem. Moreover, there is a surprising lack of academic publications on the topic; indeed, the only scientific study of coin selection appears to be Mark Erhardt’s masters thesis An Evaluation of Coin Selection Strategies.