True. And if you want to leave your investment without supervision for 5 years +, choose something like gold and silver and not tech (and especially not bleeding edge tech like zcash).
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I donât think thatâs a good argument. Money becomes worthless all the time. Like the example Hanh mentioned - 550 million euro worth of francs became worthless. Another example, 1.4 billion dollars worth of âforgottenâ reais will return to the Brazilian treasury soon.
That being said, I personally am not in favor of burning the Sprout pool, but I am in favor of deprecating it and figuring out a solution to move funds out of it later if people truly ask for it.
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Just to reiterate: ZIP 2003 does not burn any funds. If whatever governance processes are in place for a future upgrade result in a decision to allow redeeming Sprout funds, and there are devs available to implement that, and enough block producers run the resulting node software, then it would be possible. I just think that eventuality is exceptionally unlikely. On the other hand, maybe tooling around zk proofs will improve to the extent that it will become easy to implement a Sprout redemption circuit.
Please note that, apart from the explicit warnings about the possibility of pool deprecation that weâve communicated since launch, it has also never been the case that there is an absolute guarantee of funds in old pools continuing to be redeemable in the case of a security bug, for example. (At time of writing, I donât know of any security bug in Sprout.)
BTW, this discussion does seem to be flushing out some Sprout holders, which is all to the good. Incidentally, those amounts and block heights since 11 December (amounts with two significant figures and heights near a multiple of 500) are consistent with use of the Sprout-to-Sapling migration feature in zcashd.
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Exactly, there has been 4 or 5 new users here trying to import old wallet.dats or restart old wallets. They havenât said specifically that they have Sprout funds but I suspect this is the case.
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How can I check if my ZEC is in the Sprout pool?
If the Z address starts with ZC then it is a Sprout pool address.
If the Z address starts with ZS then it is a Sapling pool address.
If it a U address then you have nothing to worry about.
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Dormant BTC addresses are still being activated for withdrawals. It doesnât matter how much ZEC is locked in Sprout. That people was the first eraly adopters/believers and with stand âeconomic freedomâ they have right to restore their funds even 20 years later. People will gonna rush for their funds at XXXX per coin. Seriously, letâs make the fund and end of the story 
Btw, are there any changes in the Sprout pool since last post about it?
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You can see some ZEC moving out of sprout almost every day:
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No usage in October, a few days in September, last 2 days of August, no July activity. It would be nice to know who is using it and why so intermittently.
Not sure what you mean by âmaking the fundâ. Could you clarify?
You know, I mean, we can rationalize Sprout deprecation - but really it doesnât looks good.
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it is a consensus network. If there is only one node running on sprout , the rest of the network will not accept its transactions.
It is not a good look but resources are limited . Do we want them on maintaining sprout or developing new features?
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I believe we should figure out a solution before we deprecate it.
As a software developer, I deeply understand the despair and helplessness that can arise when a project becomes overly complex and unwieldy. So, I absolutely support deprecating outdated, underused, and hard-to-maintain components, but only if it doesnât negatively impact our holders, especially our early holders.
If we harm our early holders this time, who can guarantee it wonât happen again? And who can guarantee that we ourselves wonât age and become the sacrifices of the Nth improvement? If we do this, wonât holders have to anxiously follow community updates, fearing becoming one of the few uninformed? So, if holders have to remain on high alert to avoid losses, why become a user at all?
Therefore, I think a solution is necessary. Something is better than nothing, even if itâs a completely centralized solution, if the deprecating must happen immediately.
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It is not a matter of despair or helplessness; it is a matter of having been clear from the start that the complexity of the Zcash protocol cannot be allowed to increase without bound, and therefore that pools must eventually be removed.
For me, this is as much a matter of strongly held principle as it is for the objectors: failing to manage the complexity of the protocol increases the risk of harm to current holders (who collectively hold far more ZEC than is in the Sprout pool), and it has huge opportunity costs.
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Zebra doesnât even validate sprout transactions, anymore. They can only be created and validated by zcashd nodes which are planned to be fully deprecated in the near future. In any case, sprout txs have been extremely few and far-between, as well in somewhat small quantities (comparitively) after the last big withdrawl.
Sprout deprecation has been planned for like 6 years now at least. After CVE 2019-7167, it was just like âMigration Toolsâ everywhere and value pool deprecation discussions and eventually zip211. Sprout migration was a very prominent topic for a long time and thankfully most of the funds have been removed from the pool since then.
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Just by looking at the address, is it possible to know if it is Sprout?
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Yes, Sprout prefix is âzcâ.
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To be clear, Zebra does validate Sprout transactions. The Sprout vulnerability was fixed by changing the proof system that was used. Sprout with the old proof system is what Zebra does not validate, and does not need to because the old proof system was fully deprecated.
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