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.
@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.
No, but Monero is not a savings account, it is a currency, using it to store coins for over a decade is detrimental to those trying to use it for transactions by forcing everyone to keep old data around.
Wallets can simply notify users telling them to churn their coins into fresh blocks. Small inconvenience that will greatly benefit new users and those who use Monero everyday.
We would see 10 times the nodes on the network if the chain was only a few GB's and not growing, because just about anyone could run one.
So just like CDBC with expiration date from conspiracy theories?
Never heard of it. There is something called CBDC though and it has been publicly announced by war criminals and theives with having expiration dates, no theory needed.
If I could roll over CBDC to a new account before it expired by the click of a button I would have no issue with it expiring.