@zooko’s meta-point is the interesting part here.
The specific timeline matters less than the principle. Fees beat hard cutoffs. Gradual fee reduction gives people time to react. It doesn’t require everyone to be paying attention at the exact right moment.
On timing: at least a year of warning before any value loss starts, and at least five years before it reaches zero. If someone loses coins tomorrow because they weren’t following forum discussions, that’s a PR disaster. “Privacy coin confiscates user funds” writes itself as a headline. The technical justification won’t matter.
There’s also a fairness problem. Everyone in this forum knows Sprout deprecation is being discussed. What about holders who aren’t here? They don’t have the same information we do. Making decisions that affect their funds without reaching them first is bad practice.
The gradual fee approach handles both concerns. Each step down is another signal, another reason for wallets and exchanges to notify users. By the time it hits zero, nobody can claim they weren’t warned.
Has anyone mapped out what “broadly distributed warning” actually looks like? Wallet notifications? Exchange announcements? Press coverage? The mechanism matters as much as the timeline.