Quote from: instagibbs on June 20, 2014, 04:27:46 PM

It's the difference between saying:

1) I believe the UTXO checkpoint is valid because people built on top of it. (SPV-like, depth-based)

With a UTXO checkpoint built-in to the client, safety is guaranteed (so far as I can tell) if the checkpoint is valid.

That is the scenario the wiki discusses. The scenario I originally asked about is downloading the entire UTXO chain (not a checkpoint of it).

Quote

I'm not even trying to argue about a practical attack, I'm simply explaining why they're different. They are.

They are different but if the difference isn't meaningful in terms of security for the chain then there's no issue and UTXO and/or ledger-block can be used instead of downloading everything from genesis (this is good news btw! You should want to make it work, otherwise bitcoin won't be sustainable).