ACCOUNT DELETE

[lululu]

 

What does account deletion mean? Will it cause xrp not to be accounted for? Even if the transaction has been successful

[at3n]

The Account Delete transaction moves the remaining XRP from the account into another account specified by the transaction. Except for 2 XRP which is burned. So all XRP is accounted for.

Then the account is "deleted", i.e. it won't appear in future ledgers in the blockchain. So it will seem like it never existed unless you look back at past ledgers.

Edited March 12, 2022 by at3n
Clarification.

[jn_r]

It is basically the same as other blockchains where you can transfer all the crypto to another account, leaving an account at 0. But on the XRPLedger your account must hold a reserve in XRP, which you can't transfer out. To also redeem this reserve, they came up with the Account Delete. 

The reserve is meant as a spam prevention. Though they could lower only the reserve, but with this construct it is still expensive to create many accounts (10 XRP per account), but leaves the option open delete the account (costing 2 XRP per account). So slightly more than only cosmetic. 

I'm not sure if it also adds to storage reduction, I tend to think it does not as the history is stored anyways (As with other blockchains/ledgers - for a discussion of the difference (if any) see here)

see also https://xrpl.org/accounts.html#deletion-of-accounts

[tulo]

On 3/12/2022 at 10:48 AM, jn_r said:

I'm not sure if it also adds to storage reduction, I tend to think it does not as the history is stored anyways (As with other blockchains/ledgers - for a discussion of the difference (if any) see here)

see also https://xrpl.org/accounts.html#deletion-of-accounts

It probably doesn't in the history, but it does in latest ledger (RAM/disk usage) I think.

[jn_r]

2 hours ago, tulo said:

It probably doesn't in the history, but it does in latest ledger (RAM/disk usage) I think.

yeah I think you're right. Not all rippled servers hold complete history. For at least one point in time it must have a complete ledger, to be able to validate future ledgers, so at least from that point on it will hold all ledger info (but not the info from those accounts that were deleted before that point)

Edited March 14, 2022 by jn_r