After the discussion in The Naming of Things (viz. Statemint), I have opened a PR to change the name of Statemint to “Polkadot Asset Hub” within Cumulus. (Statemine => “Kusama Asset Hub”, Westmint => “Westend Asset Hub”, etc.).
Of course, to successfully make the change, it takes the community: wallets, UIs, etc. to start using “Asset Hub” and stop using “Statemint/e”, and also to communicate that to their users so they understand what they are using.
Further, there are two changes in particular that can be considered particularly “breaking”:
Changing the on-chain spec name from "statemint" to "asset-hub-polkadot". A lot of wallets (e.g. Polkadot Vault) and transaction libraries (e.g. txwrapper) have code that matches on chain name. This change would obviously break all of those libraries and force their maintainers and users to upgrade.
When node operators start a node, it looks for a path on disk to the chain that contains the database of historical blocks and Aura keys for that chain. Changing this path name means nodes will suddenly think they have nothing for "asset-hub-polkadot" when in fact they do, just under "statemint".
For problem (1), we will probably need to wait a few release cycles in order to give wallets time to upgrade. But for wallet developers that match the chain spec within their logic, this is your warning to start matching on "asset-hub-{relay}".
For problem (2), in discussion with collators and public RPC node providers, they mostly prefer to make the breaking change and update their infrastructure accordingly now.
Yeah, we can, and I’m open to that. I think it’s preferable to change the on-chain name because it means less confusion for newcomers to the ecosystem. Yes, everyone here now will know that “Asset Hub” used to be called “Statemint”, but someone joining the ecosystem in 1-2 years will be thinking, “why does this thing have a spec name of statemint?”
But if we really think that changing the name will cause too many problems, let’s leave it.
It is not a user facing thing so yeah it could be a bit confusing for developers but I think that’s fine. Projects have internal codename and that usually don’t match with user facing display name and this is just another case.
I think we should more opening to listen to normal users. jump out the coder’s stubborn. abviously assetHub is more clear to normal users. like the binance already usdt withdraw to statemint. do not play tricks anymore!!. as new user to dotsama eco, he will be 100% sure confusing about what is “statemint”. is there any relationship with polkadot? where does my asset withdraw into. but with “Polkadot system asset hub”. normall user will be no confusion at first glance with little study effort. he will know my asset is store on polkadot, it’s safe. people fear of unknow.
and one more personlly non professional opionion. Psychologically when a user try to withdraw asset on binance. there will be an “polkadot system asset hub” on the destination list. this is kind of Psychologically indication each time. free market tools.
Yes and that’s why the rename. But it has nothing to do with the internal names used in the code. Normal users should never see those. So this is a pure technical discussion.