Daedalus size growth ... what is the plan?

As the chain keeps growing, Daedalus Mainnet keeps taking up more space. At the time of writing, the associated Application Support folder on MacOS is almost 60 Gb. Users (like me) don’t have infinite harddrive space and will eventually flee to Yoroi, reducing the number of nodes in the network.

What is the plan? Short term and long term? Will there eventually be an option to run a node without storing all data locally, or is that technically infeasible?

All the best

It doesn’t matter. The Daedalus nodes do nothing good for the network. They are not needed. They don’t have any incoming connections from others. They just connect to IOHK nodes.

But I would not flee for Yoroi, but for one of the other, better light wallets.

It should be feasible and it should definitely come.

But as far as I have heard, IOG is busy with their light wallet and other things.

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Daedalus light wallet; should be released soon.

WALLETS AND SERVICES

This week, the Daedalus team added support for Ledger Nano S Plus, which will be delivered in the subsequent release. The team also made progress on the native Daedalus M1 development - the first superficial tests ran smoothly on M1-Mac. Finally, the team continued building a bridge between cardano-wallet and light-wallet.

The Adrestia team released an important update for cardano-wallet. The update accumulates a series of changes and improvements developed over the past few weeks.

They also continued working on adding multisig features, redesigning the DB layer, and developing a “light” mode in cardano-wallet.

Finally, the team is still working on the cardano-js-sdk MVP.

Cheers,

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Daedalus hasn’t really been all that user friendly since inception. See all the various workarounds attempted well over a year ago for various issues. It has not improved. Perhaps not ironically the third party wallet applications have now set the bar for Cardano whereas Daedalus and Yoroi simply do not cut the mustard anymore. However that is what community is about!

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Thanks for all the replies. Very insightful.

If I understand correctly, the sole purpose of keeping the entire chain on your drive is trustless validation, not expanding the network (as I believed). Daedalus in the upcoming “light mode” would then off-load this trust to third party servers, thereby loosing this trustless mechanism. Is this not a defat for decentralisation? Is there not a smarter way to perform trustless validation in a decentralised manner (not relying on a single third party server keeping the entire chain)? Or will a decentralised solution simply be too slow?

You could, I think, quite easily only verify the blockchain once and just save “Up to this block with this signature leading to this UTxO set everything was okay.”, but throw away the blocks afterwards and not let them clutter your disk. This verification would still take days as it does now with Daedalus, but it would at least not eat so much storage, anymore.

Logical next step would be that you can save (and maybe sign) such snapshots, so that you do not have to do it again on every machine, after every reinstallation, but can just reuse it.

But then, these snapshots could also be provided by other nodes that you trust.

Yes, that would be a little less “trustless”, but the current workings are also not that “trustless”. Daedalus only connects to the nodes of a single company. They already could deliver you a wrong history. They almost surely do not. It would have led to lots of problems, when doing transactions with the rest of the network, and someone™ would have noticed, but it’s still not as “trustless” as advertised. And if I trust them in giving me the correct history if I query it block by block, why shouldn’t I trust them to give me a correct snapshot and spare my computer the pointless exercise of doing the same calculations again and again?

I would think that a better layout would be that most nodes in the network – Daedalus-like wallet apps, relays, block producers – only store such a reduced current state of the chain, which is enough to do verification of transactions and new blocks, and only a much smaller, but still decentralised amount of archive nodes stores the whole history and provides it to everyone interested.

By the way: That is more or less, what Bitcoin is doing for years: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/a/92015 The more than 300 GiB that their blockchain already has would be too much for many. And even pruning full nodes are still considered full nodes with them.

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Daedalus has improved a ton since inception. It can actually do way more things than it used to for me.

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“light mode” for Daedalus, aka Mithril doesn’t offload trust to 3rd party servers. It’s relying on signed snapshots to allow faster usage.

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So what happened to Light Mode in Daedalus?

The chain has now reached a ridiculous size, making it a joke to have the app on a regular laptop.

I don’t trust the browser based alternatives (Yoroi and AdaLite), and really like Daedalus apart for the explosive file size.

You do know that there are many, many more now, don’t you? Eternl, Typhon, Flint, Nami, Lace, …

And why exactly don’t you trust them? They do exactly the same as Daedalus: Save your keys encrypted with a spending password on your computer. That is far from perfect and malware could get them. But that is true for Daedalus as it is for the browser-based wallet apps. Daedalus being more secure for the resources it uselessly eats up is a myth.

If you want security, use a hardware wallet. Period.

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Thanks for the reply HeptaScan.

I do use a hardware wallet, and connect to it via Daedalus.

Sounds like you did the research on the many alternatives. Which one would you recommend?

It would still be great to know what the status is for Daedalus “Light Mode”. Is it happening, or not?

Then, you are safe by just connecting the same hardware wallet to some of the others. It is not possible to do a transaction without the hardware wallet asking you.

I use Eternl. Hardware wallet needs a Chromium-based browser – Chrome, Brave, Edge, Opera. You can either use the web app at eternl.io or the browser extension linked there and then just pair the hardware wallet.

Others find Typhon or Flint more user-friendly. Especially with a hardware wallet, pairing is so easy that you can just try multiple wallet apps.

There was not that much development on Daedalus for months/years. It still doesn’t have multiple accounts, NFT support is very basic. I’d suppose focus at IOG has shifted to Lace instead.

They did release Mithril, though. But up to now it only allows a faster initial sync of the chain. It still needs the 130+ GiB disk space and still needs to resync after not being used for a while (and getting a snapshot from Mithril is still a couple of hours, so it’s only better to just throw away and download a new snapshot if you haven’t used it for months).

Possible that they will integrate that into Daedalus, but the really interesting new developments will probably be on Lace – which up to now is another browser-based wallet app similar to Yoroi, Eternl, and the others.

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