Deprecated Features

In order to support the continuous improvement of zcashd, features are periodically deprecated and removed when they have been superseded or are no longer useful. Deprecation follows a 3-stage process:

  1. Initially, a feature will be marked as DEPRECATED in the release notes and user-facing documentation, but no other changes are made; the feature continues to be available and function as normal. While features at this stage remain enabled by default, they may be explicitly disabled by specifying -allowdeprecated=none on the command line when starting the node, or by including allowdeprecated=none as a line in the zcash.conf file.
  2. In the next stage of deprecation, the feature will be disabled by default. Disabled features may be reenabled via use of the -allowdeprecated flag.
  3. In the third stage, the feature is fully removed and is no longer available.

Features that enter Stage 1 in a particular release will be disabled by default after no fewer than 3 releases that update zcashd's minor-version, and features will only be fully removed after a total of at least 6 minor-version updates. zcashd's release schedule intends to produce a release that updates the minor version every 6 weeks, so deprecated features remain accessible by default for approximately 18 weeks, and then can be expected to be removed no less than 36 weeks after their initial deprecation. Deprecation and removal timelines might be extended beyond this on a case-by-case basis to satisfy user requirements.

Currently Deprecated

Stage 1

The following features are deprecated, but remain enabled by default. These features will be disabled if -allowdeprecated=none is added to the CLI arguments when starting the node, or if an allowdeprecated=none line is added to zcash.conf.

Deprecated in 5.0.0

The following features are deprecated as of release 5.0.0 and will be disabled by default as of release 5.3.0.

  • legacy_privacy - The default "legacy" privacy policy for z_sendmany is deprecated. Use -allowdeprecated=none to require the default behavior to conform to the FullPrivacy directive in all cases instead of just for transactions involving unified addresses.
  • getnewaddress - The getnewaddress RPC method is deprecated.
  • getrawchangeaddress - The getrawchangeaddress RPC method is deprecated.
  • z_getbalance - The z_getbalance RPC method is deprecated.
  • z_gettotalbalance - The z_gettotalbalance RPC method is deprecated.
  • z_getnewaddress - The z_getnewaddress RPC method is deprecated.
  • z_listaddresses - The z_listaddresses RPC method is deprecated.
  • addrtype - The type attribute is deprecated in the results of RPC methods that return address metadata. It is recommended that applications using this metadata be updated to use the pool or address_type attributes, which have replaced the type attribute, as appropriate.

Stage 2

Each feature in the lists below may be enabled by adding -allowdeprecated=<feature> to the CLI arguments when starting the node, or by adding an allowdeprecated=<feature> line to zcash.conf.

Disabled in 5.0.0

The following features are disabled by default, and will be removed in release 5.3.0.

  • zcrawreceive - The zcrawreceive RPC method is disabled.
  • zcrawjoinsplit - The zcrawjoinsplit RPC method is disabled.
  • zcrawkeygen - The zcrawkeygen RPC method is disabled.