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.🙂
*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.
I think all cryptocurrency blockchains that function as money or store of value should do this. However I think 1 years worth is better than 10 years worth of data, or perhaps even less than a years worth of data.
As long as the blockchain size remains small enough for the adverage Joe to store the entire chain onto their mining computer for when or if Monero reaches mainstream mass adoption usage. By mainstream mass adoption I mean Monero is used as much as Visa or Mastcard is globally which I would assume will mean that Monero will need to handle 1 million transactions per second.
Best of all worlds is if those running nodes can select how much they want to store on their node, then the network as a whole would decide and your vote is running a node with that setting.
Not a bad idea as long all nodes will allow any wallet to recover all funds, not all transaction history, just balance.