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.
I disagree with the idea that one commenter opined: "Monero is not a savings account".
Who are you to tell me what to do with my XMR?
That being said, I am not opposed to the idea of implementing some kind of condensing/snapshot that some have outlined here.
The question I'd ask is if it would ever be possible for someone to use that data maliciously?
People can use Monero how ever they wish, but rules should be in place to prevent their use from negatively affecting the network.
If we have a giant spam attack and someone adds 100GB to the chain in a week there should be a mechanism in place to drop this data eventually.
Since there is no way to determine good data from "bad" we have to just drop all data that is aged.
Though this setup could probably be abused if funds were illegitimately taken and then ddos the network as a coverup, so all logs of it were deleted