Hello all,

I think it is time to move forward with pruning nodes, i.e. nodes that
fully validate and relay blocks and transactions, but which do not keep
(all) historic blocks around, and thus cannot be queried for these.

The biggest roadblock is making sure new and old nodes that start up are
able to find nodes to synchronize from. To help them find peers, I would
like to propose adding two extra service bits to the P2P protocol:
* NODE_VALIDATE: relay and validate blocks and transactions, but is only
guaranteed to answer getdata requests for (recently) relayed blocks and
transactions, and mempool transactions.
* NODE_BLOCKS_2016: can be queried for the last 2016 blocks, but without
guarantee for relaying/validating new blocks and transactions.
* NODE_NETWORK (which existed before) will imply NODE_VALIDATE and
guarantee availability of all historic blocks.

The idea is to separate the different responsibilities of network nodes
into separate bits, so they can - at some point - be
implemented independently. Perhaps we want more than just one degree (2016
blocks), maybe also 144 or 210000, but those can be added later if
necessary. I monitored the frequency of block depths requested from my
public node, and got this frequency distribution:
http://bitcoin.sipa.be/depth-small.png so it seems 2016 nicely matches the
set of frequently-requested blocks (indicating that few nodes are offline
for more than 2 weeks consecutively.

I'll write a BIP to formalize this, but wanted to get an idea of how much
support there is for a change like this.

Cheers,

-- 
Pieter