The size of the blockchain is constantly growing, currently on my computer the Cardano blockchain takes up 7.3 G.
One of Cardano’s main USP’s is its better resource footprint. Whereas this is clearly visible in the computational power required to secure transactions. The cumulative storage requirements are no better than the competition.
My proposal is to consolidate the blockchain by moving the oldest unspent outputs to the tip of the chain thereby no longer requiring the total blockchain to validate all possible transactions.
What is required:
As part of each block formation process the node should be required to include the oldest unspent output and create a transaction that basically sends the ada to itself (recreate the output)
Over time this will cause all unspent outputs to be only at the end of the blockchain.
The oldest block required could be encoded in each new block so a new client can independently verify how much of the blockchain it needs to sync to have the full history.
Optionally to increase efficiency even further it could be incentivized to include more than one old unspent output in new blocks. The incentive should be dependent on the number of blocks the chain is shortened by.