The zcash spam attack continues. Almost every block contains a shielded transaction with hundreds of outputs. In doing so, the spammer can successfully blow up the size of the chain by maxing each 2mb block every 75 seconds. The cost of each spammed transaction? Less than a cent.
The chain has grown from approximately 30GB to over 100GB … The effects so far have been minimal and the network has not experienced any downtime. However, some user wallets may experience syncing issues, as pointed out back in July
As an end-user that doesn’t sync their wallet daily, I just gave up. The apps I was using just seemed to take forever to sync, so I took a backup of my wallets and got rid of them. It was taking way too long to sync.
I’m kind of dreading the day I need to sync the wallet again.
Ywallet w/ spam filter will make syncing relatively painless. Give it a try - it really “just works”. It may not be instant, but at least you can actually see the progress.
Zec wallet lite has a span filter too, those links are +50 days old. It’s primarily a concern for people who run full nodes like myself In memory is getting less expensive all the time. Decent brand internal 1TB ssd’s are less than $50 and namebrand externals just a little more.
I’ve tried ZWL with spam filter and it never brought my wallets up to date. Gets stuck at 1-3% synced or just goes back to 0. I’ve tried a few times throughout the last 6 months to no avail…
That’s unfortunate but the seed and keys are compatible with Ywallet so you shouldnt be stuck with no hope. Yeah seems like nu5 kinda etched out some new hardware requirements for zcash software.
I think that the sharp increase in exchange ZEC balances, which are not observed in other blockchains, is due to the fact that when faced with problems in their wallets, people decided to store coins on the exchange. It’s a very sad conclusion, but I don’t have any others. Just think about it: people trust centralized exchanges more than a wallet for storing ZEC. This is a problem.
Part of the issue is that, apart from Ywallet, no Zcash lightwallets are functional. The mobile wallet SDK became a non-functional product once tx volume increased, and it was arguably poorly implemented prior to that as well.
I also see centralization issues with the lighwallets relying on what appears to be a handful of lightwalletd servers. Why is lightwalletd not part of the full node implementation?
If the goal is for power users to self-custody then they should also be encouraged to run a full node and connect to that same node with their lightwallet, not use some centralized servers.
Imo keeping components / service separated is a more flexible design than a node app that does everything.
I share your concerns about decentralization. According to Ziggurat stats, there are less than 100 full nodes and certainly even fewer lightwalletd.