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.
You can’t just do that. First of all, you can’t even tell what outputs are spent in Monero. Trying to remove spent outputs to prune the chain is very difficult.
People pay to have their funds stored indefinitely in monero, via debasement with the tail emission. Unlike bitcoin, where holders free ride, in Monero we lose some value over time as compensation to the network for storing our unspent outputs forever.
The security model with blocks missing from the beginning of the chain is not the same as with them. You might think this is no big deal, but it does fundamentally change the model.
These sorts of schemes have been proposed before, even before Monero. We didn’t have this feature from the start because people didn’t agree with it.
Dropping whole blocks globally is no good. Locally dropping blocks that a user doesn’t have transactions in is fine, and we already do that (pruned nodes keep some subset of the rest of the blocks to ensure that a complete copy of the chain is out there, distributed among the nodes). So we already do something like what you’re proposing, except nobody is forced to do it. If you’ve got the space for the whole thing, good, if not, run a pruned node.
Chain growth is a problem, but it’s not such a big problem that taking a hammer to the protocol and consensus is worthwhile. What you’re proposing is a drastic, not well thought out thing. We are better off chugging along until we can figure out some way to get full privacy without having to store spent outputs. We are very close to it, already MW exists that gets us ~80% of the way there.