Its only 10 days until the Genesis of Zcash!
The Zcash team has been working overtime pushing bug fixes and security hardening features that are needed for the official Launch. Yesterday the Zcash team relased a new Beta Testnet Update rc1 : Bug fixes and Launch Preperation.
This update has many improvements to Zcash but unlike the Beta2 release the network has not been reset, so you can upgrade without losing your current Testnet coins (TAZ).
Since this version is still using the Beta2 Verifying keys you can still mine on the Testnet without upgrading to this version if you wish to do so.
If you do choose to use this update please note that you will need to start your node the first time with the -index command for it to start. This is due to a Block index change. Use ./src/zcashd -reindex the first time and after that completes you can stop the server and run normally.
Src: Zcash Blog, full blog post below:
New Beta Release: Fixes, Packaging and Launch Preparation
Simon Liu | Oct 17, 2016
Today, we deployed the third beta release of the Zcash reference implementation, 1.0.0-rc1, to the testnet. This is the third release of the Zcash Beta Series. The new release includes the following changes
[1]:We added a script to create a Zcash Debian package.
[2](#1448)We have published the first release of our Gitian-based deterministic build environment and updated libsnark to support it.
[3](#1521, #1543, #1541)We have renamed the client identifier from “Satoshi” to “Magic Bean”.
[4](#1481)We have made the 100kb transaction size limit a consensus rule, rather than a standard rule.
[5](#1501)Fixed UTXO selection and improved error reporting surrounding the consensus rule that coinbase UTXOs must be sent to a zaddr.
[6](#1431)Added JoinSplits to the JSON output of the RPC call gettransaction.
[7](#1493)The ‘account’ parameter in RPC calls is now deprecated.
[8](#1490)Debug log messages for z_* RPC calls can be viewed with option -debug=”zrpc”.
[9](#1523)Fixed a bug in encrypted wallets by caching nullifiers.
[10](#1520)Added fixes to address a bug with note witnesses in the wallet.
[11](#1526, #1547)Fixed an issue where some tests where outputting data to local directory.
[12](#1506)We have updated documentation related to Tor, the release process, security risks and wallet reindexing. (#1483, #1511,#1499, #1492)
Note that this release does not reset the beta testnet and continues to uses the beta 2 proving and verify keys.
NOTE: It does however make a change to the local block index format that will cause all upgraded nodes to fail to start (because they can’t parse the old block index format). As the error message will say, please start up your node once with the reindex flag after upgrading (ie../src/zcashd -reindex ) to resolve this issue.
Link: https://minezcash.com/zcash-beta-rc1-testnet-update/
