I started running a pruned node on an old MacOS and I am a little bummed on the wallet functionality. I imported a descriptor, but the balance does not update according to the UTXOs 'owned' by the descriptor. Is there a technical reason Bitcoin Core updates wallet balances by doing a chain rescan instead of referencing the UTXO set? Similarly, a listunspent does not return the UTXOs from the descriptor but a scantxoutset returns the relevant UTXOs.
I think it would be cool for people (me lol) to check their balances on a pruned node without necessarily caring about the history, since the node already did the IBD.
Andrew Chao, Bitcoin Core dev and PSBT legend, closed this issue a while ago on Github as apparently it would be a painful rewrite of the wallet. Anyone have an explanation?
Github issue: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/issues/8497