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.
Recently we saw transactions spike to 100k per day, that is ~400MB per day, 146GB per year of data.
If this tx volume were to be sustained it already makes the chain growth concerning and adoption is just starting.
I don't actually think 150GB per year is an issue. This still gives you +5 years on a 1TB SSD. That's half a decade of time, Monero is only 10 years old. Plenty of time for storage to advance.
@monerobull @tusker is not only an issue, it is awful. Some people barely afford a storage drive of half a TB. Many nodes are actually ran on raspberry PIs.
And that 150gb is growing exponentially according to adoption. We could easily exceed 2TB every 10years.
Now, someone has to wait hours to sync the block chain already.
So what? It takes 3 days to sync an ETH node, 10 days for a chia node. These aren't lightwallets, this is network infrastructure.
I very much doubt that considering how raspberries don't have physical AES and already took +3 weeks to sync before the transaction spike.
I'd be perfectly fine with that. Right now you can get 2 TB SSDs for about 1 XMR. At the current rate (and it's been similar for decades) they will be worth less than 20$ in a couple of years. Monero turns 10 this April and we are currently at only ~200 GB. And we still have pruning!
Storage isn't the limiting factor, it's bandwidth.
The size of the chain also affects bandwidth. Many people have bandwidth caps so trying to sync 200GB could take 3+ months.
I hope we can at least have a higher pruning factor where the chain could be cut down to at least 1/10th the size as the amount of nodes continues to grow there would still be more than enough copies of the chain out there.