[Bitcoin-development] questions about bitcoin-XT code fork & non-consensus hard-fork

[grarpamp]

On Sun, Jul 5, 2015 at 9:39 PM, James A. Donald <jamesd at 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.