Quote from: casascius on October 21, 2012, 03:47:24 PM

Here's how it ought to work in my mind:

This subject has come up a couple times on IRC, here is what I've said:

I'd generally like to avoid throwing more decisions in users faces especially ones with long explanations.

The major security/burden models I've mostly been thinking around SPV, (eventually) SPV-UTXO (a full node functionally but with only SPV security), Full but completely pruned, Archive (same security as full but can act as a block explorer and boot strap new nodes). Partial archive may be possible but would require some serious p2p protocol effort to make finding the right peers possible and couldn't be used as a block explorer/debug node.

I'd expect that we'd always start in some SPV mode since it's the only way to get fast startup and then upgrade to the target mode in the background in order to have fast startups.

What I expect we'll do and would prefer would be to automatically pick the default target mode based on the system type and the available resources. This will get the maximum number of nodes running in the highest contributing state possible without aggregating people by using more resources than their system can comfortably support. Of course, there would be some way to override, but that could possibly be some burred advanced option.

As far as choices go, the amount of bandwidth to use is probably one of the settings we can't mostly hide since it's much harder to gauge whats available and we can't tell when the user is paying for it.

Though this is all completely orthogonal with ultraprune.