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RE: What will happen to the data in the blockchains many years from now?
Thank you. Very informative answer. But my question was somehow different. What I asked was that is it possible that in a future hardfork it will be decided to discard some of the old data in the blockchain?
The nature of blockchain hashing is - in simple terms - that each block gets signed with the previous block-hash. In essence that means to sign block N only block N-1 is directly needed, but N-1 blocks [N(0)..(N-1)] are still needed to form consensus ("for a re-check" of hash validity).
There are always situations possible, although rare, perhaps, in which all blocks need to be iterated over to gather data. For UA for example, to do it right, I have to go over all blocks and check for follower (follow / unfollow) mutations to eventuelly come to the conclusion that you currently follow who you follow. I need all blocks / data for that.
For daily news feed browsing, old data is hardly needed of course.
So possible... maybe. Probable... hardly.