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From the article:
  • This is a remarkable development because it was not possible before. Considering that some people only have a smartphone and not desktops or laptops, allowing them to run a node is a big step towards decentralization. By removing all unneeded data, without losing trustlessness, we are making nodes more accessible for end-users.*
I am not sure that this is such a big/new deal? After all, wallets like Breez and Phoenix already run a Neutrino node on the device. There seems to be little difference between an on-device Neutrino node and an on-device Floresta node ?
Or am I missing something?
Neutrino is lightning only, right? (Not entirely sure how it accesses the chain).
Floresta is on-chain only.
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(I apologize for the super late response, just now I found out about this post)
I'm the author of this, and here's the difference: Neutrino is a privacy preserving alternative to a third-party address indexer. It's a way to sync your wallet without requiring a centralized third party like an electrum server. However, neutrino doesn't validate blocks and transactions, it doesn't even authenticate the filters it uses.
Floresta is a fully validating, lightweight Bitcoin node. It's like running Bitcoin Core, but using way less resources due to an aggressive pruning and Utreexo.