May 29, 2026

In other news, after a conversation with @josie last night I was convinced that stripping witnesses below the milestone/checkpoint would be a fair pruning option (i.e. for nodes that want to transfer a validated full node state to a machine that is not expected to serve blocks). I ran a test of this last night, and the difference in store size was 607GiB vs. 847GiB at block 950k and the milestone time dropped from 1hr to 45 mins. This doesn't require any additional config, as it can just rely on the peer.services_maximum flags. By setting bit 10 (pruned) peers are notified that this node doesn't serve below depth 288. If this is set the node will now not download witness blocks below a checkpoint or active milestone. [At some point I'll also update the client filters feature so that the database table enable and archival aspect is also determined by its service bit.]

/// Serves only the last 288 (2 day) blocks.
node_network_limited = system::bit_right<uint64_t>(10),