Quote from: mda on November 12, 2017, 03:24:37 AM

We can't have Bitcoin in its current state, just look at https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/ . And I'm not sure Lightning Network will work as intended, even less so with 1MB blocks.

No one is sure about anything, but there is no reason to assume it won't. Besides, blocks are practically supposed to be 4 MB now as segwit is activated.

Quote from: jdoing on December 16, 2017, 12:55:28 PM

I'm sure this idea has probably already been brought up and shot down so please forgive my noob idea. Would it be possible archive the blockchain every few years? By this I mean take a snap shot of all wallet balances removing the transaction history and greatly compressing the data, this would become the starting point of transaction verification for the next few years and the archive (which would contain the full transaction history over the past few years) could be distributed by archive nodes. The archive nodes would not be necessary to validate new transactions so someone could run a "full" node without the archive. You wouldn't need as many archive nodes as full nodes and even if the archives become several TB in size there would still be people willing to provide the storage necessary to secure bitcoin.

There is decreased security in this that is unescapable. The only way to be sure that this is original blockchain is by having the entire history. A new node can not really know if this checkpoint is valid or not, not without the full blockchain. As for the verification part, there are already checkpoints in Bitcoin Core that are hardcoded and the client assumes valid, as far as I understand. And there are also options to remove the old blocks and just keep what you need, this is called a pruned node.

Quote from: mda on December 16, 2017, 05:17:09 PM

I agree that this proposal is complex but Lightning Network isn't simple as well. Also bitcoin still stays a peer-to-peer electronic cash system whereas Lightning Network brings the middleman in the equation.

It is not that complex if you read about it. You can see the 3 part article describing it here to some extent https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/understanding-the-lightning-network-part-building-a-bidirectional-payment-channel-1464710791/ ,
It is a common misconception that LN is introducing middlemen. This would be very simple and nothing special at all if it was the case. Using online wallets you can already do this. Instead LN is a pretty smart way of doing this in a safe,trustless and decentralized manner. It is not perfect of course, but it is an amazing optional improvement.