Except I can literally pull up a full node and see a wallets current balance - which is because it traces all the transactions through the blockchain, verifying all of them.

Literally the only way anyone can see their wallet balance is by doing this.

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charcircuit 2 days ago | parent [-]

You can find your balance by looking at the UTXO set and seeing if your adress can spend it. There is no need to trace where those UTXO came from.

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lazide 2 days ago | parent [-]

But every full node does, because it is required to validate the chain.

Near as I can tell, you just don’t know how Bitcoin actually works?

	▲	charcircuit 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		I will say it again. When validating the chain all it cares about is that the sum of the output UTXO for a transaction are <= the sum of the input UTXO. All the input UTXO are no longer valid once spent and can be forgotten.