Monero is striving to be a currency that everyone can use, the growth of the blockchain is starting to hamper this goal IMO.
I think we should consider dropping blocks off of the chain tail once we reach block height of 4000000. This will give us 10 years of storage capacity, more than enough IMO.
Similar to how you have to exchange bills of cash once they get worn, you would simply churn your coins to get your outputs into younger blocks.
We are trying to be digital cash not an inheritance vault. If we had this feature from the start 99% of the community would agree with it.
Please consider this.๐
*Edit: @4KB/tx * 100,000tx/day we are looking at ~400MB chain growth daily, this is not sustainable, let's take care of this now before it becomes a big problem
**Edit: A possible solution could be that nodes would have the option to set chain retention duration. So when syncing a new node you can select that you would like to retain 5 years of chain data, with a minimum boundary enforced that retains sufficient security. This way the network decides in a fair way how much chain data is useful to store.
@tusker @monero Chain growth is a real problem that is often dismissed because storage prices are falling. This makes sense when you're small and there is not much activity, but that could change in the future.
However, I don't think you can simply drop old blocks without burning someone's savings? One probably should look into what Ethereum people are doing with their state expiry proposals.
@silverpill @monero @tusker
If you were to take old transactions and roll them over to new genesis transactions at the same address but without a need to validate a history, I think you could safely drop the history of those coins without any affect to the end users. Probably would need to have the new genesis transactions on the chain for a few hundred or thousand blocks before the history was dropped to prevent malicious actors from forcing history to be dropped early.
Having the possibility of a full archive node and a fast syncing node that builds on top of snapshots is a great way to satisfy both the need for history keeping and block size management.