Ledger size problem

[usagi32]

A high throughput blockchain is not necessary a good thing. Solana, for example, suffers from some potential issues that everyone in the web3 community acknowledges as its low block times, low fees and high throughput leads to computing centralization. Also its ledger size is a problem something no one in the community has a proper answer to, not even its developers. Currently it's petabytes of data per year, which inevitably will increase as more people use blockchains.

I fear this can be worse for linera, while microchains are free from compute and network load problems, our block times are non-existent as the whole network proposes them individually and parallelly. We can run into ledger size problem faster than solana, maybe in the starting years only. Then the network can become centralized and the block fees can rise.

These things should be foundational to the protocol and its core values before we go mainnet. We would have to think about problems like

• State compression
• Pruned validators
• Archival nodes and their incentives
• RPC nodes

One of great things about successful decentralized blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum is that anyone become a validator and their full nodes can be made to run even on something like a RaspberryPi.