@GingerAle Sorry about my delayed response, been busy killing brain cells over the weekend and haven't had much time to check this thread.
Do you have any projections on how large the blockchain would be when fully maxed? I.e., the 100 billion addresses as proposed in the "account" document?
I believe I have attempted to come up with a rough estimation in the past but I can't remember what the answer was. You should be able to get a rough idea by checking the current size of the trie and how many addresses exist. It wont be small though, at least a few dozen gigabytes in size. But I highly doubt we'll ever actually reach a point where that many addresses exist, and if we did it would be a very long time from now. We could probably come up with a good solution if it ever starts to become a problem anyway.
Also, does the current implementation address fungibility and privacy at all? What may be fascinating is that, inherently, the account system preserves fungibility once the coins have been absorbed into the account ledger. While the transaction is in the minichain, not so much though. If its not addressed, is there a way to address it?
There has been some discussion in this thread about methods for making transactions more anonymous and private. I think one of the most promising techniques is stealth payments because it should be compatible with the mini-blockchain scheme. Edit: there is also this thread which you may find interesting, but it looks like the links to his paper don't work anymore:
Anonymity in the Mini-Blockchain schemeit seems this balance-type "blockchain" would be a good fit with blockless cryptocurrency, as described here with DAGcoin.
I will read into how DAGcoin works and get back to your later with my thoughts, it seems like it could be an interesting concept.
If I understand how cryptonite works (which I probably don't), when a user goes to make a transaction, they are essentially minting coins (from their available balance).
Coins are never really minted in Cryptonite, even coinbase transactions have an input which points to the coinbase account. Coins get subtracted from one account and added to another when a transaction happens. If you add up all the balances of the accounts in the account tree it will always be the same because the coinbase account started off with all the coins.