Is it possible to restart the blockchain?

[deisik]

That's the point I never forget to mention

Which is that we now have to cope with a lot of let's call them "legacy" shortcomings, which were basically trade-offs back in the day (so they were justified, to a degree). But now they have grown into real roadblocks and obstacles as they weren't disposed of later in due course. And the worst thing is that we will see our problems multiplied in the future unless we efficiently get rid of them before it is too late

Could you give a couple examples?

You can find an article in the Internet by some prominent digital money proponent where he explains why Bitcoin succeeded despite being mostly a bunch of trade-offs. He claims that Bitcoin was successful specifically because it didn't try to be a perfect solution

I didn't save the article, but it is pretty well known

So why do we shut our eyes to these future problems? As they say, prevention is better than cure (and I totally agree with that)

With millions of users and so many different stakeholders with different interests, we should expect drastic changes to the protocol to be controversial. The people who have so far opted into Bitcoin agreed to the current rules, right? Changing them isn't so easy with such a diverse ecosystem

Actually, I'm perfectly fine with that myself

What I'm not fine with is when people start complaining about stalled adoption and at the same refusing to accept that this is an inevitable result of this approach. For example, I can't really expect Bitcoin to become a world money if it would depend on a bunch of rogue miners, end of story. If this is a goal (as claimed), then we should do something to actually get there, right? And that means change, sometimes even radical change

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[MainIbem]

The idea of making the blockchain work faster is definitely a great one. However, I don't think it is necessary to build a new one entirely. These are what normally accounts for updates. Whatever is done to make it work can be synchronized with this existing one to make adjustments in the codes and that will automatically work, else it will turn to hard fork or soft fork.

[deisik]

I appreciate the idea but I honestly believe that we can focus on improving infrastructure and technological advancements would be the prime factor in the expansion of the essential infrastructure. In other words, instead of reducing the size of essential data, we should adopt better hardware (storage) and upgrade to 4G, 5G would make the data transfer easier and faster reducing the need of elimination of data in the coming decades

I see it pretty much like on-chain scaling

That is, instead of solving the problem in its entirety without any extreme expenses (by pruning the blockchain as required), you are basically postponing it by funneling even more resources into it and making it only more burdensome in the future. And I'm not sure how 4G and 5G are going to help here when the Internet speeds in most parts of the world are still around 1 mb per second (or even below that)

[FaireumOfficial]

I was thinking about the ways to make the blockchain smaller, and the most obvious and simplest solution that I came up with consists in restarting the blockchain one day. For example, we can start with an empty blockchain every year with only initial balances written on it and without any transactions. I think that would make the whole network more reliable, while full nodes easier to maintain

Of course, the previous blockchains should be available at all times as well, whoever may need them. We may have to tie them up into one whole using links or whatever so that we could always trace all transactions back to the genesis block. Note that we don't necessarily have to restart with an empty blockchain as we can, for example, save the last 2-3 years of transactions once the blockchain is restarted

Is this a good idea?

If you are talking about linking an old blockhain to a new one, then there are a couple of things you should be aware of.

Primarily, expect the old one to die, because of the massive migration of people form the old one to the new one.
Additionally, it would just end up as starting from the UTXOs, which i don't know if you really want.

[deisik]

I was thinking about the ways to make the blockchain smaller, and the most obvious and simplest solution that I came up with consists in restarting the blockchain one day. For example, we can start with an empty blockchain every year with only initial balances written on it and without any transactions. I think that would make the whole network more reliable, while full nodes easier to maintain

Of course, the previous blockchains should be available at all times as well, whoever may need them. We may have to tie them up into one whole using links or whatever so that we could always trace all transactions back to the genesis block. Note that we don't necessarily have to restart with an empty blockchain as we can, for example, save the last 2-3 years of transactions once the blockchain is restarted

Is this a good idea?

If you are talking about linking an old blockhain to a new one, then there are a couple of things you should be aware of.

Primarily, expect the old one to die, because of the massive migration of people form the old one to the new one

Well, I'm not sure if the term "die" is correct here

We are basically freezing the old blockchain, even setting in stone, figuratively speaking. So how can it possibly die when we are in fact making it eternal, indestructible and irreversible? You can think of it as a read-only archive to get a better understanding of what I propose here

So if anyone is interested in old transactions, that being an academic interest and idle curiosity (for example, to see how it all started 100 years ago), they can easily download the first 50 years of Bitcoin transactions to their brain circuitry and relive the history

[Alpinat]

I guess creating a new blockchain is what you are talking about and also if you are talking about restarting you also saying that to delete the history of bitcoin. The history transactions in bitcoin is the prove why it is trusted. I don't think that restarting it will be the best decision.