Good day all,

Maintaining the entire blockchain ledger and running a full relay by general public is a crucial, foundational aspect of BTC. It's also a substantial commitment in storage, bandwidth and increased need for security. While IMHO those who can, should do it as a public service, there's also a possibility of network somehow compensating those who maintain full ledger. I wonder if this has ever been pondered : can it be done in a way that would incentivize it for individual, independent users vs corporate agents with quasi-unlimited resources ? What are the downsides and upsides beyond obvious ? What does the future hold - what will full ledger look like in a decade from now and how viable will it be then for Joe Internet to keep it on his home network ? Has anyone considered a compression algo that would specialize in good blockchain performance ?

Currently (2023) full ledger is about 435 Gb.  Bandwidth consumption of 200G/month in UPLOADS is reported norm, if left unchecked. I feel a systemic risk to the network that may drift momentum towards large users with unlimited storage and bandwidth in a way that may jeopardize security and decentralized nature of the network.

On other hand, how critical is most of that data to stability and security of the blockchain ? Perhaps my concerns are out of ignorance and it will do just fine when less then 0.01% of all self-hosted nodes maintain a full copy.

With respect
unixux