I understand a committee is chosen to vote and arrive at a consensus during block proposal. But once the block is chosen where is it persisted? I mean is the blockchain persisted across “all” the participation nodes or across all the committee members?
there are special nodes - archival nodes … in the algo terms they are called relay nodes…
the participation nodes are the relay nodes without archival feature on (they hold only last 10k blocks or something like that)… archival nodes holds full history (~1TB for mainnet)
A node can be:
- archival or non-archival: archival means that it stores all the blocks
- participation or non-participation
- relay or non-relay: relay nodes are public nodes forming the network layer of Algorand
These properties are orthogonal with the exception that a relay is necessarily archival.
We also strongly discourage relays to be participation node.
And in general, participation nodes are non-archival, but this is not mandatory.