WinZEC, Zcash4win/mac, Overwinter and Sapling: an uncertain future

Yeah I know that view on zcha.in I don’t understand how you can derive how many are on winzec from that?

Ah OK, you can’t but it’s simply an inference that those crazy old nodes are ZCash4Win as the previous versions were released as 1.0.4 and WinZec 1.0.12 if I am not mistaken i.e. who would be running 1.0.4 and are not using Zcash4Win? If you run getpeerinfo on a node then you can probably get a good estimate as the subver was set to Beanstalk i.e. "subver": "/BeanStalk:1.0.12/" as opposed to MagicBean for official releases. As @anon47418038 points out this wasn’t done for the Overwinter release of WinZec so there’s no way of knowing.

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I’m right now connected to 8 nodes and when I run getpeerinfo all of them are magic bean and not bean stalk. Is there a better way to run getpeerinfo on all full nodes?

no you have to crawl the whole network, and the Great Firewall also doesn’t let you make inbound zcash p2p connections, only outbound…at least it used to…and at least 1/3 of my userbase is from there

also WinZEC identifies as magicbean not beanstalk, as it’ll auto-deprecate…and, you know, bigger privacy set

and it’ll die sometime between Overwinter activation and Sapling

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most of the historical data was also lost at one point, so “past year” and “all time” are very…not correct

none of it is closed source its all on github, you just have to know where to dig

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I believe this would give the closest answer GitHub - zcash/zcash-seeder: Network bootstrapping for the Zcash cryptocurrency via DNS, else it’s just an estimate.

That’s true of the 1.1.0 release but not 1.0.12 right?

Basically, anything running 1.0.4 or 1.0.12 is very likely Zcash4Win or WinZec related assuming I got those versions right. As per 1.1.0 it’s not possible to know.

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yes that is correct, I haven’t had the server resources to run my own mapper anymore or time to make a UI for one, so when zchain lost all their data I just gave up on that

I just ran this on my node with 75 connections and as you can see 12 of them (16%) are WinZec 1.0.12 and you can assume that a fair number will have already upgraded to WinZec 1.1.0 so it’s clear that it’s a decent chunk of the network. It would be good to see this for the entire network though.

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I compiled and trying to run the zcashseeder.
I’m having a hard time understanding from the README what exactly to run to scan the Zcash network.

So the version supported by winzec so far are 1.0.4, 1.0.12 and 1.1.0 ?

Yeah @anon47418038 correct me if I am wrong but Zcash4Win was 1.0.4 and then WinZec used 1.0.12 and subsequently got an upgrade to 1.1.0.

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Ohh I didn’t know this maxconnections parameter; I’m running it now with 125 and see what statistics I get.

yes iirc that is correct

I finally got Tromer on the phone, civil dialog is open, we’re talking and We Will See What Happens

For the moment i have acute bronchitis and sinusitis and am on a pile of medication for that and am going to get some rest.

Peace,

D. Jane

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What we should really leverage is the fact that the subver is designed to support multiple components. For example, if the GUI Foobar uses the ZcashCo binary releases, then it could have subver:

/MagicBean:2.0.0/Foobar:1.0/

Version privacy is an interesting point, but it’s not something we currently try to hide. We’d likely need a full overhaul of the P2P layer in order to do that properly, so I don’t see a need to optimize for that at present.

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oh I like it…20 chars

I just fired up a full node and it connected to a MagicBean 1.0.3 node and I am like “who are you and what are you running on???”

Well while I slept the community (mostly a large anonymous zaddr donation) dropped 80 ZEC into the “WinZEC on Sapling” fund, as can be seen via the block explorer links up-thread, so consider things Back To Normal, and I’m not gonna do a chainfork or walk away from WinZEC or anything extreme like that.

Just please everyone understand the bursty and unpredictable nature of down-stream platform/OS/processor support, which is why the (nearly there!) goal of having non-linux and eventually non-x86 builds be in mainline zcash is such a big deal, and thank the god of your choice we’re all nearly there (props to @kozyilmaz again on such excellent work on the Mac side and getting things upstreamed!!)

Mac users are still somewhat left out in the cold, they will have to either run the just mentioned excellent command line version and manually run the Swing UI Wallet, and there needs to be a good FAQ written up for that…and unfortunately the “manifest MacZEC” donation addy above still is at a big fat ZERO. This is why companies’ mac releases tend to version lag, disappear or never happen in the first place. Too small of user base (which saddens me as I am typing this on my beloved macbook pro, and my mac port is how I splashed onto the whole crypto scene in the first place!)

Anyway, community support has come through yet again, so I don’t think I’ll be needing Foundation support to make it through to Sapling with a Windows GUI wallet, @acityinohio

We now return you to our regularly scheduled programming.

Peace,

-D. Jane

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The user agent could indeed be used (perhaps in addition to other information) as a way to uniquely identify nodes at the networking level at the moment. I agree that replacing the P2P layer with a proper mixnet could alleviate this concern, while potentially preserving useful user agent statistics.