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.
Hi, indeed this is not possible with Monero for various reasons (coinbase verification; can't identify spent TX outputs). In case you don't know, the Mina cryptocurrency has solved this blockchain storage issue. A fixed-size (<30KB) cryptographic proof is enough to validate the entirety of the current state (the latest block).
It requires a network of proof generators with incentives in addition to the block producers. Scalability is not great (similar to BTC) and does not provide anonymity (not a priority either). Checking the state is computationally intensive too (not suitable for smartphones; requires around 10GB of RAM).
It is improving on relatively new cryptography techniques (ZKSnarks), likely to evolve (less stable protocol than BTC; security not battle-tested).
This is pretty exciting. I hope as this kind of technology develops we can integrate it into Monero. It would be great to not have to worry about spam attacks bloating the chain and making it more difficult for everyone to use Monero.