The SD card angle is the sleeper feature here. The number one complaint I hear from people running Bitcoin Core on a Raspberry Pi is that the constant UTXO database writes destroy their SD cards within months. Utreexo basically eliminates that failure mode by not maintaining the UTXO set at all.
The bandwidth tradeoff is real but the trend lines favor it. Storage and NAND prices have been going up. Bandwidth prices have been going down or staying flat. Tadge made this point in his original thread and it's worth repeating: utreexo is betting on the right side of the cost curve.
The hardcoded UTXO state for instant bootstrap is interesting but it introduces a trust assumption that's worth naming explicitly. Someone has to compute and commit that state. It's the same tradeoff as assumeUTXO in Bitcoin Core. Pragmatic and safe if you verify after the fact, but it's not trustless out of the box.
The SD card angle is the sleeper feature here. The number one complaint I hear from people running Bitcoin Core on a Raspberry Pi is that the constant UTXO database writes destroy their SD cards within months. Utreexo basically eliminates that failure mode by not maintaining the UTXO set at all.
The bandwidth tradeoff is real but the trend lines favor it. Storage and NAND prices have been going up. Bandwidth prices have been going down or staying flat. Tadge made this point in his original thread and it's worth repeating: utreexo is betting on the right side of the cost curve.
The hardcoded UTXO state for instant bootstrap is interesting but it introduces a trust assumption that's worth naming explicitly. Someone has to compute and commit that state. It's the same tradeoff as assumeUTXO in Bitcoin Core. Pragmatic and safe if you verify after the fact, but it's not trustless out of the box.