> Here's a thought experiment for you; why don't you just get rid of all the "archive" nodes? By all means, do it. Blow them all away. You can still transact o

> Here's a thought experiment for you; why don't you just get rid of all the "archive" nodes? By all means, do it. Blow them all away. You can still transact on the chain and send or recieve funds from any other valid address or call contract functions just fine. And then anyone who wants to do things like run a block explorer or look at how a particular account's balance has changed over time can resync to an archive node *using only the contents of a full node*. Archive nodes just retain additional account level indexing of what the block history (and all the transactions contained in those blocks) already contains. > Only if you redefine "current state" to be "not actually the entire state of the blockchain". 'Current state'⋮ At the present time, what is the balance of any abritrary account? What is in the current storage of any arbitrary deployed contract? Full nodes have 100% of that, without querying anything from any other node.