https://www.unknown.fund/ Unknown Fund - Press Release 11/13/2019 [snip]

In addition to developing and moving the entire cryptocurrency space away from legacy non-privacy non-anon first generation tech... such as, say, the interesting failure to use TLS etc in their transports against rampant surveillance... Cryptocurrency also needs to develop and move away from the obscene transaction-based perpetual growth of first generation blockchains... away from the still unwieldy, risky and even faulty predictive claims that phones and computers will keep up, that in some cases give excuse to continue use of central or even faux-distributed "light wallet" lookup models and dependencies ala SPV, the current requirement that ever growing Terabytes of such chains exist in perpetuity for UTXO validation back to their Genesis Blocks... such TB's of data easily datamined for privacy, censorship, abuse, and subject to future unforseen privacy exploits, and a pointless storage and transport offense laid upon everyone... To blockchains that regularly checkpoint, bring forward, and mine the UTXO's into an ongoing UTXO state database, discarding all old transactions whose outputs have all been spent. Consider it a sort of "coinbase input" reference similar to what was done with BTCP's import of BTC UTXOs on day one, but one that is now continually mined forward with consensus into a database structure. Such databases could be distributed into a network structure, and or held in clients, etc. It may be possible to manage a hashed series of n-week old UTXO datasets, or even move to mining UTXO's forward directly from the transaction stream into an atomic database. Such UTXO database and operations could parcel out its functions to miners, relays, clients, wallets, DHT, Encrypted Overlay Transport and Storage Networks such as I2P, IPFS, etc... as needed for computation, distribution, query, bootstrapping, etc. The development of UTXO databases will immediately cut all future [ir]responsible speculation on the storage question... from the legacy thinking of "all historical transactions needed", down to the more sensible and narrower fact of only "all UTXOs needed"... which is a vastly smaller and slower growing amount of space. Keep in mind that a "currency / cash / gold / etc", purely monetary coins function... do not care about what tx history went into making the current state, only that the current state, the nominal values held in hand for future use over the network, is valid. And that purely monetary coins are sufficient for their own purpose, skipping all the other pile-on design-limiting functions such as token carriage, where so merited for a monetary success if need be. In that case, see below regarding DEX. There seem to be some formation of ways to do UTXO databases as some whitepapers are now speaking to the subject. They are hard to find due to immature terminology and space flooding. Feel free to create and curate a list of such papers for others to refer to. The combination of the following technologies, among others... - Privacy Coin tech (for all the fine reasons, in protocol, by default) - Blocksize and other TX tech (to handle expected transaction rates) - UTXO Database tech (to not blow out the ecosystem later on) - Cross-Chain Distributed Exchange tech (for all the fine reasons) - Secure and Overlay Transport tech integration (for all the fine reasons) - Anything enabling Secure Comms and Meetups (for all the fine reasons) ... should bring the cryptocurrency space into a much better position to tackle, uphold, and carry out the reasons it was created, and the prophecies it is to fulfill. Bitcoin-BTC, and most of today's other coins, may be unlikely ones to introduce such tech, at least not without some laughably embarrasing public backtracking, or such complete reboot and coinbase reinput so as to be new anyway... ever. Coins aren't really pluggably design and feature modular yet, as such, most leaps in tech progress still need to be ground up. With true cross-chain DEX (CCDEX's) combined with the rest of the above tech, it doesn't matter which set of coins end up doing it, users will trade into them, letting all legacies and incapable proposals and failures, rightfully die. Cryptocurrency is moving into its second decade and still presents an extremely rare opportunity. Do not let those windows close due to certain legacy models, say... of FUD, rulers regulating, spying, power, lack of security, self-interested shitcoins, etc... exploit them to win, for all the world's people.