In the long run it’s not a problem due to maximal growth economics at scale. When I raised this question myself, I forgot about the value in extra “mud” sloshing around the network for improving data obfuscation. Even with this in mind, dirvine talked about automatic ways to identify dead data in the early days (look for the google tech talk presentation). There are other solutions to this in the form of archive nodes, temp data markers, and giving the user incentives to remove unwanted data. This topic has been talked about at length with regard to safecoin but it is applicable to data in general. Other threads in the forum have considered this from time to time. Keeping everything allows for a lot of simplicity, and a lot of benefits at the same time.
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