What I was saying before was that the current implementation does not serve the most important of those functions of being a "way to avoid initial sync DoS by low-difficulty flooding". They protect against another type of DoS flooding, but that type would be done against all nodes, not just initially syncing ones. This is what I was trying to clarify with Greg in my last comment, so let me know if you see it differently.

For the second function, did you know that the current checkpoints impl does not skip all the signature checking for pre-checkpoint blocks? For example, during headers-first IBD, it is a race between how fast the header chain is built relative to the next checkpoint available and how fast the block responses come in from async block requests. Once a checkpointed header is sync'ed, then all blocks before it will skip signature validation, but before that happens, sig checking is on.

As a way to judge progress, the current checkpoints are so out of date that I don't think they serve the purpose well either.

Checkpoints, as I assumed they worked before I looked at how they actually work, could be used to remove consensus code that is only used to validate blocks buried deep in the chain. #8391 is the reason why I dug into how the checkpoints are actually working. Thus they could be used as a way to cleanup the codebase if implemented differently. PoW purists would probably not like that, but then they probably would not like #8391 either. What do you think?

More recent checkpoints? #7591

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