Archival nodes and the farmer's dilemma

in the discord announcement on the 4th June, subspace asks for operators to run an archival node to speed up sync times.

We Need Your Help

Slow sync time has been affecting some users. This is to be expected at launch, given that 5k+ nodes are attempting to sync all at once from a small set of bootstrap archival nodes.

We would like to invite as many of our community to run archival nodes to strengthen the network and overall improve the syncing time for everyone. Follow the steps in the link below to get started. Please note you cannot convert your existing node to an archival node, so you need to start a new one (100G+ of space suggested). You will still participate in the farming process as an archival node.

Does this mean altruistically setting aside 100G of space for archival space? I understood subspace resolved this kind of “farmer’s dilemma”.

It is more like setting aside 50G of space at the current level. However, differently from what most people know about archival nodes from other chains, you can still participate in the farming process with your Subspace archival node, making it not solely altruistic action.

That said, as part of the roadmap, a future upgrade to the network will remove the need for archival nodes entirely for the syncing process. So what you see currently is mostly temporary.

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Got it thanks Wei. Can you confirm that running an archival node is no longer relevant due to this? `--keep-blocks` doesn't work in Subspace · Issue #555 · subspace/subspace · GitHub.

Yes and no. We are keeping the parameter there because we plan to fix that bug and we dont want to default to archival for everyone, but for the time being, either way its ran will run as an archival node unfortunately.

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