Isn’t this a problem for all blockchains as they grow?
If a full node wallet no longer is recommendable for end users, isn’t that a security risk? Somehow blockchains need to adress this issue, is it possible to archive older transactions that has more than a couple of hundred thousand verifications and so should be hard to tamper with?
It is. Some say that is one of the things, why blockchains are a stupid idea.
The Bitcoin blockchain is now at more than 380 GiB, but you do not need that much to run a full node.
As far as I understood it, a full node only gets the full blockchain on first start, but throws away old data that will not be needed anymore after validating it.
They somehow need to ensure that there are some archives out there that still have all the data. Don’t know how they do it. Don’t know how we will want to do it.
Ah, yes that does sound like at solution. Maybe incentives to run full nodes the same way people today compete to run staking pools?
If there is ADA to be made, there will be people willing to run full node archives i’m sure?
Was thinking about that also, but it’s not easy to implement.
How should an archive prove that it really has the full archive? As long as there are other archives, it could just get the information from them if it is asked (maybe through some private relays, so that it is not blatantly obvious).
You definitely do not need the full history to be a block producer. The last couple of blocks and the information about all open UTxOs is enough to validate transactions as well as blocks. Nobody outside will notice. And the incentive for doing an alternative, less resource-intensive node implementation will only grow.