My thinking is as follows:
1. UTXO bloat (4 GB -> 12 GB in the last year?) has already increased the growth and hardware requirements (I had to replace my Pi4 8 GB)
2. Bitcoin core has done nothing...
Thanks, let's dive in, shall we?
What issue were you experiencing with the Pi4?
I'm asking because there is a common misunderstanding that the entire UTXO set needs to fit into RAM, but that is not the case. The UTXO set is mostly stopped on disk. You only need a couple gigs of RAM for Bitcoin Core to run decently, although more is certainly helpful. UTXO set growth means slower IBD and generally more disk reads during validation, but it's a graceful degradation, not a cliff.
What issue were you experiencing with the Pi4?
I'm asking because there is a common misunderstanding that the entire UTXO set needs to fit into RAM, but that is not the case. The UTXO set is mostly stopped on disk. You only need a couple gigs of RAM for Bitcoin Core to run decently, although more is certainly helpful. UTXO set growth means slower IBD and generally more disk reads during validation, but it's a graceful degradation, not a cliff.
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