We cannot expect thousands of full nodes to store any transaction ever occurred. It has to be sufficient to only save the transaction origins not older than two years.

There are around 371k Blocks so far. Let's compress the first 200k to only wallet balances in one file. When we reach 400k, the next 100k blocks are compressed and then deleted.
So we create every 100k a new master-block out of it and still have the transaction origins of at least 100k Blocks or almost two years.

Would that less dynamical “pruning” compared to my first proposal work? Any security issues I miss again?

Why not? My understanding of pruned blocks is that they keep all UTXOs with the necessary intermediary hashes to compute the merkle root. What pruned blocks get rid of is transaction history, unspent coins scripts are still all there.

Not even a problem-- the wallet support was just untested so it was disabled to avoid delaying the feature. It more or less worked from the very first patch (as 0.8 radically change the design of the software to accomidate that-- we've been working towards it for a long time).

This problem is already solved with the pruning implementation.


The problem with pruning is that you can't bootstrap a pruned node without downloading the complete blockchain. You do not need to store the blockchain but you need to download it once to create a current UTXO database.