You can absolutely take this to extremes, and that’s kind of what the stateless client direction is about; we ended up deciding that that’s a little too extreme, essentially because that would ultimately end up relying on second-layer markets where users pay nodes in the network to store witness data, which ends up basically degrading into a more rickety and less transparent rent scheme. Additionally, requiring witnesses for everything is a bandwidth hog, and also requires access lists, which harms censorship resistance. Rent + sleeping/waking is essentially a moderate position between status quo and statelessness, where there is a specific set of accounts that benefit from the status quo concept of state, but you have to pay per epoch (or per week) to remain in this set.
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