August 18, 2017- Dev update

Releases
This week we released 1.0.11 after delaying it a few times. We thank everyone waiting for their patience and expect to be back on track with upcoming releases. This will become easier with more engineers and a longer release cycle (6 weeks).

We started some initial planning for 1.0.12 with a focus on database performance and reliability improvements and will dive deeper into planning in the coming weeks.

Science projects
A lot more work has been put into the upcoming Sapling design including benchmarking of the new implementation with an announcement set for the near future. Keep an eye on the blog for this.

Weā€™re also very close to releasing the preliminary UX research weā€™ve done which we hope to impact and give insight for the general cryptocurrency community. This will also be announced on the blog.

Hard fork 0 & Auto-senescence
We had another meeting about the HF0 planning which included the topic of the auto-senescence feature we added into 1.0.9 which essentially automatically deprecates versions older than 18 weeks (with a warning at 16 weeks). Itā€™s worth noting that with our new 6 week release schedule (updated from 4 weeks), the deprecation will happen just as a new release is out and the warning will occur 2 weeks before that. We donā€™t anticipate this as an issue so we donā€™t have plans to change the deprecation timeframe but will keep an eye on how this works out as we progress in our releases.

We also had a long discussion about the logic for block height activation. We concluded with an agreement to indeed activate HF0 using a block height parameter. Next step is to figure out how and if hard fork signalling should occur. 2017-08-18 edit by Nathan Wilcox: Thereā€™s no ā€˜protocol signalingā€™ planned. See this Zcash #2286 comment for clarification.

XCAT
Next Friday at 18:00 UTC weā€™re hosting a Show & Tell to demo a working implementation of XCAT between Zcash and Bitcoin.

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I noticed this ā€œBenchmark z-addr performance for large wallets #2587ā€ will this allow for pools to send mined zcash to minersā€™ z-address wallets?

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#2587 is benchmarking how z-addresses work with wallets that have alot of inputs like the kind you would see on an exchange or a mining pool. The next upgrade to 1.0.12 may use the new lower RAM proving system seen in this PR: https://github.com/zcash/zcash/pull/2243 so we will see once that upgrade takes place if pools and exchanges start using z-addresses.

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