[phkahler]

...every bitcoin transaction ever made is publicly and permanently recorded in the distributed ledger...

Does this ledger ever get rolled up? I thought something like that was part of the system. Otherwise you'd have an ever growing transaction log and the system would fail eventually, wouldn't it?

[Obi_Juan_Kenobi]

Yes and no.

Since pruning support was added, a full node no longer needs to have the full blockchain. In situations where storage is limited, you simply need enough for verifying new blocks.

Many nodes will still keep the full transaction history, though there is no requirement to for bitcoin to function. As long as there is interest in looking at old transactions, people will hold on to that old data.

[sp332]

Don't you have to download the full blockchain when you bootstap a new node, to verify all the transactions? After you verify that a transaction has been spent, you can prune it from your local copy. But someone still has to keep all the old transactions around for new nodes to download, right?

[Natanael_L]

In theory, in the future the blockchain status can be compressed to just the "UTXO set" (unspent transaction outputs) with a Zero-knowledge proof of correctness. That would be a form of maximal trust free pruning.