On Sun, Jul 5, 2015 at 9:39 PM, James A. Donald <jamesd@echeque.com> wrote:
substantial and ever growing costs and inconvenience.
Of course, restraining the block chain to manageable growth without losing other good characteristics is inherently hard
Doubt there's any use case that requires "bignum" worth of single fully independant "full" nodes trucking around tens of TB worth of ancient history. With new things come new rules. Bitcoin could declare 1/2/5/10 year checkpoint intervals by which addresses must forward to new addresses. It could distribute the legacy data across legacy archive farms who demand monetize their existance as daily tx miners do. If for some reason user wasn't able to forward in time, the farms could issue checkpoint statements [for all] or sign their tx for a fee, user might dissolve value back into and out of the farms under contract, etc. Seems many different ways to solve the petabytes / phone problem. And as long as no one, not even the anonymous ever has to go outside bitcoin, such as to an exchange... it's still bitcoin. What's "hard" about bitcoin is deciding how to do the tech while still remaining true to the original philosophies.