[everfree]

There's a wide spectrum between a piece of data being maintained by every participant of a particular blockchain and maximally available, and that data being completely unavailable to anyone.

It's that spectrum between 0-of-N and consensus-enforced N-of-N that you don't seem to grasp.

I'll say it again, once a piece of data is no longer maintained by all N-of-N participants in a blockchain as a matter of its consensus protocol, that doesn't mean that the data gets automatically deleted from the internet and from everyone's hard drives. On the contrary, there are many reasons why particular actors would want to retain that data, one of which is the very thing we are discussing - to keep a transaction history in case old transactions need to be audited for potential criminal prosecution of $625-million exploits.

> Other chains either drop, or plan to drop data that's been on the network for over a year or so

Yes, the chains, i.e. the actors that are keeping the minimal amount of data to continue to participate in the protocol, drop that data. That doesn't mean the data disappears from the internet. Instead, data availability is likely to remain incentivized within dedicated sub-protocols. That's not to mention the numerous private entities that will have their own external incentives to retain that data. Quote from Vitalik:

> Older blocks, transactions and receipts/logs would still be accessible through dedicated sub-protocols (eg. the Portal Network) or externally developed protocols (eg. TheGraph), in addition to a much smaller but still sufficient number of volunteer nodes and block explorers. Note that many dapps are already moving their historical data queries to TheGraph and similar protocols for efficiency.

> https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/qzvsfq/impromptu_...

[dmitriid]

> there are many reasons why particular actors would want to retain that data

> data availability is likely to remain incentivized within dedicated sub-protocols

> private entities that will have their own external incentives to retain that data

A lot of wishful thinking which is presented as fact. Someone somewhere might still retain all that data because someone somewhere might have some incentives, and hopefully someone might still retain that data.

Whereas the reality is this: history will be purged. There are zero guarantees for availability of any historical data after the purge.

Additionally, the linked reddit thread is hilarious. "State expiry is so important for decentralisation, so we're proposing a solution where actual history and state is stored on a few centralised nodes, maybe". And there are literally no answers to the question "what happens to historical data" except "well maybe there will be altruism and maybe there will be incentives to store data in some protocols, oh and this centralised service infura surely will want to store the data, trust us it will never disappear".

Yeah, right.

[everfree]

History will always exist because I will personally keep a copy of all of it. The chain grows by 140GB/yr, and it's within my budget to buy two new 10TB hard drives every 7 years (two for redundancy).

[dmitriid]

Ah yes. In a completely "trustless" and "decentralized" environment I'm asked to trust an unknown centralized entity that they will keep all the historical data and have it open for inspection, pinky swear.

[everfree]

Why do you care so much about historical data?

If you really care that much for some reason, store it too. Law enforcement will.

[dmitriid]

> Why do you care so much about historical data?

Literally in my first comment that you keep responding to with handwavy things like "surely someone somewhere will store it perhaps maybe we don't know but you just have to believe"

[everfree]

In other words, you need a copy of everything that's ever happened on Ethereum because it makes you personally feel uncomfortable that the internet eventually forgets things, but you want other people to host it for you for free because you don't feel like buying a new $200 hard drive every seven years to store a copy yourself?

I'm blindly guessing. You didn't actually say in your first comment why you care about having a copy of all historical data. Unless you're implying that in over a year you may need that data to personally mete out vigilante justice to the Axie hacker or something.