Someone was working on
flipping the blockchain, apparently design phase is over but there were no updates since 4 months. Two years ago there were estimates that 90% of blockchain can be pruned.
Heh, why not just prune it all once a month and then anyone can do any transaction they please.
Fliping the blockchain means doing proof of work on UTXO (it will be merged minned) so that new nodes won't have to download whole blockchain to verify new transactions. Currently 0.8x qt nodes calculate their own UTXO when downloading blockchain, with flipped chain POWed UTXO can be downloaded directly after downloading blockheaders. Of course some well budgeted organisations (NSA) will prefer to have complete record of all transations (and some good blockexplorer available to employees).
a distributed blockchain seems definitely the best option to me. probably the know-how is already there (torrents etc.).
then even who shares his bandwidth and diskspace could earn a slice of the fees pie.
Bandwidth is more expensive than storage.
Call me when there is a fully functional UTXO implementation in place. So far all I see is a lot of chat, and a demand for payment to do the work.