i don't ever want to one day be trying to consult a blockchain explorer and it won't show me some of my old transactions because it pruned them.
Then run your own node.
Running a bitcoin node is intensive. You not only have to have a very large 500GB or so download but you also have to sync up all the time. Now would you be willing to perform that action for every single cryptocurrency that you use? Of course not. Because you would need a bazillion hard drives.One for solana, one for ethereum, the list goes on and on. It would become a full time job just keeping all your blockchains up to date. Hopefully none of the hard drives crashed because if it did you have to download another 400GB.
No one is required to run a full node instead of a pruned node because you want them to.
Anyone can do what they want to but it would seem to me that pruning takes away your ability to look up and even construct transactions of your own. So it's not even really a useful thing for someone like me. If you have to consult an external bitcoin explorer website to get transaction data then what's the point of running a pruned node at all? It's not going to be trustless.
Although it's probably worth pointing out that any blockchain explorer which prunes all transactions from x number of blocks ago would be useless to most users and would receive very little traffic.
Exactly. Useless to people because you can't look up transactions. You can't really do anything. Except verify transactions or something. Helping the network as they say.
the poor people probably use an app on their phone when it comes to bitcoin. come on now.
Maybe. Or maybe they actually care about the core principles of bitcoin and want to be able to verify transactions and blocks themselves and not have to trust third parties to do it for them.
Maybe but I'll be honest, the last thing I would want to do if I was having trouble putting food on the table is running a bitcoin node. How would it help me?
Exactly. There were many altcoins, where people thought that "someone" will run a full node. Guess what: in some cases nobody did, and then there were cases, when it was no longer possible to create new full nodes, because all nodes were prunned, so it was no longer possible to do initial blockchain download.
So isn't that an argument against pruning?
After thinking more about that, you will understand, why storing large data on-chain is not a good idea. Then you will start to think about the opposite case: data compression, and making initial blockchain download easier, to make it more decentralized, and to encourage people to maintain the network.
No I still think that pruning leads to no one eventually having the entire blockchain. Just like you mentioned happened to "many altcoins".
Poptarts come in 13 flavors these days. Hard drives are larger than 20TB.