Hello everyone, first post here...
I've been thinking about Zerocoin (
http://spar.isi.jhu.edu/~mgreen/ZerocoinOakland.pdf) integration, and it occurred to me that it's possible it could also be used in a new alternate coin to eliminate the need for Lite clients and gradual blockchain bloat. If the blockchain is only stored for the last 6 months or so, but Zerocoins are inherited by subsequent blocks, then people would be forced to mint Zerocoins in order to retain currency long-term. This should provide the necessary Zerocoin traffic to make the currency truly anonymous, while also cutting down on blockchain bloat.
Initially this leaves potential bloat in the form of abandoned Zerocoins, but if these also had a limited lifespan (possibly longer for higher denominations) this could be avoided also. In this case users would just have to re-mint their savings occasionally to show they were not abandoned.
Someone please correct me if this wouldn't work. If any non-newbies think this is a worthwhile suggestion, I'd appreciate it being copied to the MC2 alternate currency thread (
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=169204.260).
