For anyone that has had to do an intiitial block download recently, certainly could be useful and help speed things up.
Mixed feelings however on this getting misused by being made ‘default on’ by future devs.
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When I did my initial block download, I was of course upset about it taking a week to download...but at the same time I was excited to think about the history of that entire ledger and proud to become a full archival node.
We have to be careful about this new thing for sure. We need some mechanism for nodes that use this method to receive some kind of warning from peers. Maybe peers can create a hash of their own utxo set and communicate this hash with the baby node and warn the user if the hashes don't match from the peers they communicate with.
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The two largest software clients for Bitcoin nodes, Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin QT, can be pruned.
Bitcoin QT is not a node? It's a frontend?
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It's currently single process, containing all three - full node, wallet and Qt GUI.
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Ah okay. Didn't know that. But it's running Bitcoin Core inside, right?
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Yes, there are two executables you can run for Bitcoin Core - bitcoind, which contains only node and wallet, and bitcoin-qt, which contains node, wallet and GUI.
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This is gonna be controversial....
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In summary, James O’Beirne proposes that pruned node operators may optionally trust a developer-reviewed snapshot of the blockchain at a specific point in history. A pruned node can use that snapshot hash to reduce the large file size of Bitcoin’s blockchain.
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