Recently, I have seen a lot of development effort going into techniques for different ways of storing, pruning UTXO/TXOs. The main motivation cited is reducing block orphaning, which is mining-fullnode-only problem. My personal fullnode does not care about if the UTXO is fetched from disk and takes time to verify. (as long it’s well under 10 mins)
Miners (referring to pool owners who actually run the full node) today are rich people with huge amount of investment costs. Buying extra RAM should be relatively small investment compared to other things.
I understand that bitcoin is a open source project and anyone can work on whatever they like, but I fail to understand the real motivation/need for UTXO set pruning.
1) Is there some other reason for research behind UTXO set size other than preventing block-orphaning (large UTXO set so that it does not fit in RAM ==> longer time to validate blocks for miners ==> More orphans)?
2) Directly related to the first question, is making sure that UTXO set fits in RAM really that important for non-mining full nodes?