Thanks for the feedback! I totally agree that setting expectations and letting people plan ahead is important. We won’t do anything without appropriate planning and communication.
For now, since we as a community and an ecosystem haven’t decided on a lot of long-term things yet — such as the possibility of switching from Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake — I would advise:
- Don’t assume that Zcash will never change, even in important ways.
- But remember, it can only change in ways that some sufficiently-large subset of the community supports. If there’s a change that a lot of people oppose, then either it won’t happen at all, or there will be a fork so that each sub-group gets what they want.
- Do keep your private keys where you can get to them within a few months.
- Do stay aware of big developments via the forum, news sites, or the blog.
- Do join the Zcash Foundation! This is a way that you can make your voice heard and be part of the evolution of the Zcash community.
About your other question, I love SPHINCS! (It’s not that I love it because I helped invent it, it’s that I helped invent it because I loved the underlying ideas.) I do feel like SPHINCS would be a much better long-term digital signature algorithm (see Figure 0 at the top of A History of Hash Function Attacks). I haven’t thought through all the engineering and UX implications of your suggestion, though.
As I mentioned elsewhere on this AMA, I think increasing the number of types of things that users might hear about is a major UX cost, and so I would want to try to figure out how to make SPHINCS be the only digital signature algorithm. (Oh yeah, and also as I mentioned, I consider incurring technical debt to be a major cost, too.)