Even governments change their currencies. When France, Germany, Spain, etc., switched to the EUR, they deprecated their supremacy coins. People had a deadline for converting their coins. Personally, more than 20 years later, I still find some Francs from time to time.
I think there should be an expectation that ZEC can expire under some major circumstances.
Initially, I was against the deprecation of Sprout. However, after learning more about that technology, I think the burden of carrying that code forward outweighs its risks to the protocol and slows the development of new features.
I have an idea that is probably not technically feasible. Nevertheless, I will post it and maybe someone will have some thoughts in this direction.
A year ago I was convinced that it was impossible to take a snapshot for shielded addresses. Now that Namada has written a huge thread about it, I donât think so. However, I still donât understand how the mechanism for claiming rights to NAM tokens will be implemented, but technically the snapshot probably is half of the solution to this problem.
The other half is a network resilience mechanism that is very likely to be implemented. What if you think about how these coins from Sprout could get into this mass of future issuance after the old pool is no longer supported?
And what if the people who have a fair right to these assets and who for whatever reason have not been able to use them in a timely manner could somehow claim their right in the future by having functionality that utilizes the Sprout snapshot?
We should already be on the way to deprecate Sapling instead of having ethical questions about Sprout.
Talking about user adoption, nothing could be more confusing than having 3 different privacy pools.
There could be a protocol conversion mechanism, automatically, I say this as a future feature. If I have the 24 words and within them there are several wallets, the system could identify that address X has become obsolete and perform the conversion to the most recent pool.
You can always allocate such an amount from the devfund â lock it for a while (postpone it by a few years ), leave one old node in case, and manually pay out Zcash from this fund in response to potential requests (link on the official website) with a private key (since weâre assuming that practically no one will actually need this anyway ). Maybe by the time NU7 arrives, most of the funds will have been moved as well.
Sure, but none of these changes truly prevented Sprout holders from using their funds. I think weâll only see complaints (if we ever see themâŚ) when we actually disable Sprout withdrawals.
Should Orchard holders decide something that only impacts Sprout holders?
Yes, since the security of Zcash where ZEC lives is influenced by the existence of Sprout code in the code base or not. All ZEC are created equal. The pools are not.
I commented on this a number of years ago, and I still think the same way.
I am happy with deprecating legacy pools, but I think it is also important to be able to redeem my Zcash in the future from a pool if I can prove I control the keys. Even if this were a separate tool or an offline process that potentially takes weeks/months.
I agree that most of these coins are probably due to lost keys etc. But some may simply be long forgotten wallets.
Thought experiment, I bought/mined Zcash in early days, keys stored on an old computer. Stepped away from crypto due to disillusionment/price decline. Get on with life. Hear about Zcash in mainstream media many years later which triggers the memory of those early days. Boot up the laptop, still have the keys, result, try to access my Zcash, no luck, theyâve been destroyed. Tough luck?
Sprout users have had more than 5 years to move their funds to a new privacy pool. Thatâs more than fair.
Their negligence/apathy/carelessness/ignorance (whatever you want to call it) imposes a burden on the vast majority of the network participants in terms of costs, security and complexity.
Irresponsibility should never be rewarded by bailouts otherwise you end up pretty much where the legacy financial system stands today.
I can not point to you where the Zcash ecosystem has asked ZEC holders to move their funds but I can gladly point to you your own contradictions.
One of your latest post:
âZEC holders are not children that should be educated by ECC/ZF.â
So which one is it exactly? Are ZEC holders children? Should they be spoon fed? Or is it a case of damned if you do and damned if you donât and whatever the Zcash Foundation or ECC does itâs always the wrong thing anyway?
I may or may not be a holder of ZEC in the sprout pool. I havenât run zcashd on my computer since sometime in 2019. I just compiled it and started it syncing. I can see that there are half a dozen sprout addresses in the wallet and a pair of sapling addresses. I remember something about a turnstyle and I remember starting it at some point. I do not yet know whether all the ZEC moved from all the sprout addresses to the sapling addresses. I assume that will become obvious whenever the chain sync is completed.
Speaking as someone who at the moment does not know whether I have funds in sprout addresses or not, I can say clearly that if I had happened to get around to firing up zcashd a year or two or three (however far into the future you deprecators are planning to nuke the sprout pool) and found that you had effectively decided to nix my ZEC by fiat that that would suck and my trust level for whoever made that decision, whoever developed that software, and for the zcash project altogether would instantly come to approximate my trust in Janet Yellen, Steve Mnuchin, and the entire USD cartel. Iâd vote with my fingers to find a different crypto project to hold my hodlings.
Sprout deprecation was communicated pretty loudly. It was no small thing at the time; sapling over sprout like now orchard over sapling. So not only has it been years, weâre also well into the next thing. Plus the rocketchat is gone but archived and I bet theres stuff on there.
We talked about this then (and since a few times) about a solution but it was still pretty fresh and so maybe not so urgent. Also its not like a trivial problem either.
Zcash developers âSorryâ after deprecating holdings of early adopters who are not plugged into their engineering project enough to carefully follow their online forum for years.
This is silly. I bought a ton of baseball cards in the 90s⌠boxed them away for a couple decades then retrieved them to find many had became water damaged and also their market values had plummeted. point of the story is that its only a naive fool who could make an investment and not actively care for it along the course of time.
i once held a weird crypto.
then at one point i noticed they had an update so i wanted to move my coins into 1 wallet to later move into exchange to sell.
somehow the amount was too big and it was weird centralized wallet with email user accounts and they just blocked my account and access to any coins.
thanks for your considered opinion. I donât think the baseball cards is a good analogy but thatâs fine. You see it your way. I never thought of the ZEC I bought as a collectible. I thought of it as money. I always thought it should be money and still think it should be money. I think itâs a shame that thatâs not how the folks running the show here see it. But I guess it is what it is.
obvious logic pitfall here is that youre applying your subjective perception of Zcash to things⌠in reality ZEC as with quite literally the other million crypto assets invented in the past decade or so⌠theyre all speculative investments. if youve talked yourself into anything more idealistic then sorry buddy but thats your individual responsibility or maybe worse, youve been duped by somebody taking adavantage of you⌠into believing in a castle made out of sand. Ive got a few other flopped investment stories to tell if you wanna here them lol
that was my first thoughtâŚ
then decided to listen to the core engineers
it just has to happen, and it was stated since day one that it could
they will find a way to redeem
), leave one old node in case, and manually pay out Zcash from this fund in response to potential requests (link on the official website) with a private key (since weâre assuming that practically no one will actually need this anyway 
). Maybe by the time NU7 arrives, most of the funds will have been moved as well.
