Trade big volume of the blockchain for ...

[Come-from-Beyond]

The life is full of trade-offs:
- Risk VS Reward
- Image compression level VS Image quality
- Confirmation time VS Transaction security

The blockchain keeps growing but can we "trade" its big volume for anything else? Storage usually can be substituted by extra computations, but the blockchain can't be compressed well. Any ideas WHAT the bloated blockchain can be paired with?

[flower1024]

The life is full of trade-offs:
- Risk VS Reward
- Image compression level VS Image quality
- Confirmation time VS Transaction security

The blockchain keeps growing but can we "trade" its big volume for anything else? Storage usually can be substituted by extra computations, but the blockchain can't be compressed well. Any ideas WHAT the bloated blockchain can be paired with?

maybe redundancy, decentralisation and reliability

[DeathAndTaxes]

The blockchain can't be compressed, however it can be pruned.  Despite all the gnashing of teeth this is why the client change to make tx with outputs below the dust threshold (roughly 50% of min mandatory fee) was very important.   Economical outputs generally will be spent thus there are new outputs added to the UXTO and spent outputs removed from it.   The blockchain may grow exponentially but the pruned blockchain or the UXTO will grow closer to linearly.  So while pruning today may reduced the blockchain by X% in the future it will reduce it significantly more.

I think eventually many nodes will not download the unpruned blockchain but rather just the pruned version or at least pruned only for blocks deep enough in the chain.   Most things can be accomplished with "only" the pruned blockchain even mining and the storage savings are significant.

So you may eventually see three classes of nodes:
archive nodes - complete unpruned blockchain (complete canonical record of Bitcoin since the genesis block).
full nodes - pruned blockchain.
SPV nodes - real time query to full nodes for relevant portions of the blockchain.

[Come-from-Beyond]

Of all the bottlenecks storage is the complete non-issue.

It doesn't matter if blockchain size is a bottleneck. That was a philosophical question. If such a pair exists than a client based on completely different approach can be created. Main difference between archive, full and SPV nodes is QUANTITY. I'd like to see difference in QUALITY.

[DeathAndTaxes]

Unless storage is 0 it will always be about quantity.  Not even sure how quality applies to a concept like the storage requirements.  Still I removed the first paragraph.

You can trade storage for security.  One example is a DHT.  Split the blockchain across 100 nodes and you reduce the requirement per node by a factor of 100.    That probably is a bad compromise to make when dealing with money.  If someone attacks the torrent DHT worse case scenario you download the wrong content (or thinking the content doesn't exist).  If someone attacks a Bitcoin DHT worst case scenario is they trick you into thinking you were paid when you weren't.

[Come-from-Beyond]

You can trade storage for security.  One example is a DHT.  Split the blockchain across 100 nodes and you reduce the requirement per node by a factor of 100.    That probably is a bad compromise to make when dealing with money.  If someone attacks the torrent DHT worse case scenario you download the wrong content (or thinking the content doesn't exist).  If someone attacks a Bitcoin DHT worst case scenario is they trick you into thinking you were paid when you weren't.

Aye, seems this is the answer.