Is Merkle tree pruning described in the whitepaper feasible/useful? If not, would there be any alternative?
From what I understand, a full node will download everything, verify everything first. Then only the pruning starts. Thus, the issue of inconsistent pruning does not arise. As off now, there is no common consensus on the UTXO sets. For example, up to block 500,000, the UTXO set is &quot;XXXX&quot;.  Just download &quot;XXXX&quot;,it should be fine. I believe we will have this feature in the future. As off now, fullnode have to download everything, verify and then only prune.