I am reading this The Beacon Chain Ethereum 2.0 explainer you need to read first where it states:
The contents of the Beacon Chain is primarily a registry of validator addresses, the state of each validator, attestations, and links to shards
Just to be sure, this content is basically the content of the latest block of the beacon chain? hence the current block represent the state of the beacon chain? Or the state is stored/linked somewhere else?
The contents of the Beacon Chain is primarily a registry of validator addresses, the state of each validator, attestations, and links to shards
Here the author is most probably talking about the Beacon Chain global state, in the current specs it's called BeaconState.
This data structure does hold all those information, but it is not included in every BeaconBlock. You can rebuild the BeaconState by re-executing / verifying all the tx included in the BeaconBlocks prior to the one that is currently considered the head of the chain. The beacon state (just like every blockchain state that I know of) can be recomputed by public informations present in the blocks.
When you sync to the beacon chain, you rebuild the BeaconState, just like syncing on Ethereum 1.0 means rebuilding the Ethereum 1.0 global state.
