@d5000: Thank you for your detailed answer! I really appreciate it.
- As our community is generally in favour of decentralization in most aspects of the cryptocurrency ecosystem, we would like to implement BIP65-based atomic swaps to minimize dependency on centralized exchanges - but they wouldn't work with the mini-blockchain scheme, because it doesn't use Script and doesn't allow hashed timelock contracts.
That‘s a valid point. I didn‘t realize that Cryptonite‘s mini-blockchain scheme has no scripting ability at all. I agree that it’s important to have scripting. I also agree that Slimcoin will benefit from supporting atomic swaps.
- A switch to the mini-blockchain scheme would need much development effort. Pruning only transaction data and not OP_RETURN data would mean that we cannot simply copy from Cryptonite, so it would mean even more effort. Yes, one could store the hashes also as a "final state", but then the nice "versioning" feature would not be possible anymore. That may seem a minor problem, however.
I‘d like to emphasize that a small efficient blockchain is more important than the versioning feature. After all a small blockchain is the basis for decentralization. And that‘s what cryptocurrencies are all about!
But I understand that improving Cryptonites mini-blockchain scheme is too much effort.
I am not against pruning in general - in fact, I would love to have the Bitcoin 0.10+ pruning feature enabled, but the SLM code must still be updated to enable that. Also I'm more a 2nd-layer guy, not so much a Big Blocker, so I would love, for example, see extension blocks or sidechains implemented in Slimcoin, so the main chain can stay "slim".
If for all these questions/problems a solution is found, I would be happy to switch to the mini-blockchain scheme, but it should be a long-term goal at most. A "prunable transaction type" (Ardor has something like that) with lower or zero mandatory fee, for example, would be perhaps a better solution, so contracts and other time-intensive transaction types would not be affected.
These are good proposals! I really would like to see more effort to make Slimcoin really slim. As the name suggests Slimcoin should have a small footprint. Let‘s make its blockchain as small as possible! Let‘s make the synchronization as fast as possible! Any step towards these goals would be great. I think more important than adding to funtionality is improving performance and efficiency.
Having „Slimness“ as a long term goal would be great! It would give the whole project a direction and a core volue. We could evaluete new features by asking the question: „does it make Slimcoin slimmer?“