Most is not all. Funds remain in the Sprout shielded pool.
It is extremely concerning to see developers in this thread essentially promoting the seizure of shielded user funds (by depreciating sprout) while wasting time appeasing exchanges that are hostile to user privacy by implementing support for TEX transactions.
Maybe if you use some of the time being spent on anti privacy features, you would have more time to protect the shielded funds of users by retaining Sprout support and speeding integration of shielded Zcash into hardware wallets.
If Zcash is ever going to become a popular storage of private value, backwards compatibility is essential. Early users were not made aware at the time that their coins would essentially be forfeited if they didnāt move them within a certain period of time. Cold storage shouldnāt have a time limit
I am all for dropping Sprout. Keeping it around seems to be a hassle for the devs, eating up time and resources that could be better spent on other upgrades. We are already juggling significant complexity with all these different pools and address types. For new users, it might be a headache to navigate. Simplifying to fewer address types and fewer pools would make onboarding much easier and smoother. Best case for the future would probably be 1 shielded pool, 1 transparent pool, each with one single address type. Just my opinion on this.
We are all entitled to our own opinions but I think community consensus is clear about the pool we should be depreciating first being the transparent pool.
I disagree, community consensus is not clear at all about that. I want to see a coinholder vote. Everything else is subjective and biased. Including your frequent posts on this forum about that topic dear Tsupportisharmful.
If I had to vote today, I think I would vote against removal.
I had the opposite opinion before, but because:
lack of Payment Disclosure / Viewing Keys support on regulated platforms
recent substantial work on wallets such as Zashi and in particular Zingo, moving t-addrs to a ādanger zoneā
I feel like t-addrs is basically a feature that, if handled properly, is fine for now. Hopefully we do eventually get support for Payment Disclosure / Viewing Keys but we probably need to focus on adoption before we can ask for platforms to implement that. The time will come.
We should practice pool deprecation though, starting with Sprout I suppose. The first step is to define a date and communicate it waayyy ahead of time. Iād say three years.
Only zcashd internal wallet and full node wallets like zecwallet ever supported Sprout. Any continued support past the EOS halt would need to built into an existing wallet and there are no plans to do that as far as Iām aware.
So, thatās where we are basically. Should we maybe make a plan then?
I mean hopefully we have learnt a lesson with what has happened with Ledger and people having their funds locked with no reasonable way to get those out. In the case of Ledger they were recommended to input their passphrase into a hot wallet, which was evidently a failure in itself. But once we deprecate a pool, thereās the potential of them not having any way to get those funds out.
Thereās some great work being done lately to make the Zcash ābrandā shiny, itād just be a shame for us to find yet another way to stain it. We give them three years, publish an identical post from all Zcash orgs on all channels explaining why, and just execute as planned three years from now?
It was deprecated with Sapling and Zcash v2.0.0 upgrade in late 2017. The upgrade took a year to complete and it has been like 7.5 years since it launched. Users were warned abundantly then and throughout that time to move out of Sprout while the pools functionality was whittled down to that being literally the only thing they can do. Having the sole, legacy function to withdrawl/migrate from Sprout would be nice going forward but I donāt think that option will persist beyond this 8th year.
There are people with Sprout funds that came to Zcash because they care deeply about privacy. The only āprocedureā that has ever allowed for Sprout migration (via turnstile) is completely unacceptable to some people as it requires the use of the transparent pool. To some Zcash will become a complete failure if shielded funds are ultimately lost forever for all users that refuse to use transparent Zcash.
The privacy preserving answer is below. It just needs to be built to avoid the loss of shielded funds/privacy loss choice where privacy purist users are still stuck with.
Many coins in sprout are known to be lost because of key mishandling or bad txs so it will never empty completely. Metrics indicate that there may only be a single active user left and, overall, that outreach about migration was effective. This person will have to use zcashd in order to transact, so they would be aware of the coming deprecation because of the line needed to be manually added to the conf in a recent release.
Maybe a final warning blog would be in order to try to reach any other straglers sure though having already had warning equaling the better part of a decade, I donāt know how effective it would be. However, incorporating information about other changes forthcoming in the replacement stack and wallet api would be really good.
The point is not just about Sprout (we all know it had critical flaws). It is about trust. Even the transparency promoters is Zcash claim users have a choice to use transparency or not. That will turn into a lie if Sprout funds are seized for all users not willing to use transparency in the turnstile process.
If the above scenario occurs why would any privacy purest (that never wants to use the transparent pool) ever trust Zcash again? What guarantees are there that the same thing wont happen to Sapling or Orchard pools when/if they are depreciated one day?
Right, itās just my point is that āno planā and āI donāt think x will happenā arenāt looking very serious. Setting a date years ahead warning everybody of a major event is very clearly the way to go imho. But weāll see, at the end we will be able to judge the method once it happens and token holders react publicly.
Zebra replacing zcashd was announced about 2 years ago just after Zcon4 so there has been a plan and zebra may actually support that stuff (I think) but no wallet is scheduled to support it so, in effect, thatās pretty much equivalent to removing it, from a user perspective. There is no plan to remove Sprout code from zcashd because after it halts, it wonāt matter.
I have no doubt about the correctness of what you say, but I donāt think youāre getting the point Iām trying to make.
Iāll start with me. I have no idea what you are talking about to be honest. I canāt recall that communication youāre mentioning and Iām following semi-closely the Zcash ecosystem.
But what matters is not me, what matters are all our token holders at large, most of those donāt follow things closely. There should be, or should have been, a communication specific to the pool deprecation, when exactly, what it implies, why itās necessary and how we recommend to handle it.
It feels like weāre making mistake after mistake with no-one to own anything and no lessons being learnt along the way. There has to be a proper method to handle those critical changes in how the network behaves. Itās not rocket science, itās just basically:
All orgs agree on a statement
All orgs publish that statement on their various channels
Relevant crypto media are informed and asked to push an update on the matter.
I donāt even understand how we are not already in agreement that this is just the bare minimum.
The entire point of the turnstile is proving that no extra coins were minted in Sprout when it had the inflation bug.
So which is more important for the health of the network?
Keep the turnstile as-is to prove that no extra coins were minted leading to infinite inflation
Changing the code back so a couple theoretical privacy maxis can move thier coins shielded to a newer pool, thereby negating the inflation check and exposing the other pools to the inflation risk?
My perspective: communicate well in advance Sprout is going away (as @outgoing.doze suggested) publish instructions for how to move before then, then deprecate Sprout. Better to leave that bug in the distant past.
There was this as well the zcashd deprecation roadmap thread started here on the forum. Itās been the core devs focus for the past year at least.
As far as actual official dates or announcements, that would be the responsibility of the maintainer of the repo ECC and they have stated that zcashd will be disabled by the end of the year (Like said, I agree a blog post saying this and talking about the wallet API changes coming would be fantastic).
As discussed above this is a false dilemma. We can build a privacy respecting mechanism (in addition to the existing turnstile) to protect the remaining Sprout funds from being lost without the inflation concern (because value issuance would be limited to the amount remaining in the Sprout pool).
Alright, let me rephrase because looks like weāre stuck. Do you think the average Joe that bought Zcash back in the days when it made all the news has any idea what zcashd is, or Zebra?
My point is the communication up to that point is intra-dev only. Thereās really nothing to actual users. Users are the most important and we behave like they are the least important.
