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When you eliminate all "archive nodes" (i.e. actual full nodes), it becomes impossible to trustlessly determine the longest PoW chain.


No it doesn't. Archive nodes don't do any consensus-critical operations that pruned nodes don't do. Moreover, non-pruned nodes are a distinct category from archive nodes. An archive node is a non-pruned node that also stores historical snapshots of the state.

The analogous node in Bitcoin would be a full node that stores all copies of past UTXO indexes, instead of discarding the old UTXO index with every new block. Bitcoin doesn't have such nodes, so Ethereum archive nodes offer functionality not even available in Bitcoin.

I would suggest going beyond Bitcoin echo chambers when learning about how Ethereum works. You're not doing yourself any favors being misinformed about projects that compete with Bitcoin.




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