Halo 2 deployment

Technology zcashd client
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Hi @zooko,

I’ve heard it bunch of times about Halo 2 upgrade is in the hands of Zcash community:

Can you explain how? Every zcashd release is automatically deprecated in 16 weeks. Without zebrad, how is it possible for Zcash community to avoid Halo 2 (not that community wants to, after all it is Zcash funded development right?).

Also what’s the timeline of Halo 2 and/or deployment plan?

Thanks,
dontbeevil.

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I think it would be about whether the community adopt the new release or not. The way I see it, as long as it does not deprecate any of the current functions in all pools, then that should not be controversial.

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(Speaking for myself, not ECC.)

It certainly isn’t a foregone conclusion that Pollard / Halo 2 will be deployed. The community could object. In order to do so, it would actually need to express those objections. So far I’ve only seen three categories of argument against Halo 2 deployment:

  • performance (which actually is a misconception that we’ll be able to disprove);
  • technical risk; this certainly is an important consideration but we think that the risk can be thoroughly mitigated;
  • opportunity cost of potentially doing something else for the next upgrade instead (but note there are so far no proposed protocol changes that are being crowded out in favour of Halo 2).

I would frame how governance works for Zcash in a different way than Zooko; obviously the default behaviour of zcashd does carry a lot of weight. If people carry on running ECC’s zcashd releases then whatever is implemented in those releases will be the protocol.

IMHO this is a feature. If people disagree with the priorities set by the ECC/ZF governance process, they should need to fork the code themselves and have sufficient development resources to maintain that fork. A fork, in any block chain, that does not have sufficient development resources backing it, cannot succeed in the long term. This is why the development of zebrad will be a substantial step toward decentralisation of Zcash.

As for the timeline of Pollard / Halo 2 deployment, we have said that we’re aiming to have it ready for deployment in NU5, which is tentatively planned for mainnet activation in June 2021. It might not actually be deployed in that upgrade; we won’t risk deployment of something that is not ready.

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That’s exactly my point, if its forked, then it won’t be called Zcash. So it is not “upto” zcash community to decide whether to deploy Halo or not. IIUC, there is going to be new shielded pool, new address type like Sapling right?

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Publishing ECC’s official technical & protocol roadmap in advance would help community & users. After all, all the work ECC does should directly benefit Zcash & in the best interests of Zcash. So ideally, there should be 100% alignment & 0 disagreements with community.

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If it were up-to you what features & protocol upgrades would you like to see & work on? (genuinely asking)

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They publish a roadmap each year: ECC R&D and Engineering Flight Plan for 2020 - Electric Coin Company

I would expect a updated one next month or so.

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Is ECC going to focus on scalability post HALO deployment?

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good to see ideas from community (unrelated to this topic)

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Happy Holidays everyone!

We will be publishing a 2020 year in review and our thoughts for 2021 sometime in January.

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OH MY! I’m sure some folks in community would be interested in ECC marketing blog posts dry run.

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I was wondering about what the name of the upgrade would be too but if posting about it a little soon was a mistake, its certainly non-crucial.

Side note, Prof Greens security blog is a far more interesting read (especially for us slightly more noided folks) than some twitter tweets

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Soil-shift, 20characters