Author: Gavin Andresen 2013-02-09 15:50:34
Published on: 2013-02-09T15:50:34+00:00
Bitcoin version 0.8.0 release candidate 1 is now available for download from the sourceforge website. This release is designed to handle the increasing volume of transactions on the network and to improve its performance. The new release no longer maintains a full index of historical transaction ids by default, so looking up an arbitrary transaction using the getrawtransaction RPC call will not work. The new release includes many improvements such as Mac and Windows binaries signed with certificates owned by the Bitcoin Foundation, to be compatible with the new security features in OSX 10.8 and Windows 8. LevelDB, a fast, open-source, non-relational database from Google, is now used to store transaction and block indices. Pieter Wuille implemented many optimizations to the way transactions are verified, so a running, synchronized node uses much less memory and does much less I/O. He also implemented parallel signature checking, so if you have a multi-CPU machine all CPUs will be used to verify transactions.There are some important bug fixes in this release. One of them was related to the position of the “change” output in most transactions which was not being properly randomized, making network analysis of the transaction graph to identify users' wallets easier. Another bug fix makes it a little bit more difficult for attackers to double-spend a certain type ("lockTime in the future") of zero-confirmation transaction. The release notes include instructions on how to upgrade to the new version. If you are running an older version, shut it down. Wait until it has completely shut down (which might take a few minutes for older versions), then run the installer (on Windows) or just copy over /Applications/Bitcoin-Qt (on Mac) or bitcoin-qt (on Linux). The first time you run after the upgrade a re-indexing process will be started that will take anywhere from 30 minutes to several hours, depending on the speed of your machine. If you have enough memory, running with the -dbcache setting (e.g. -dbcache=1000 ) may make re-indexing faster.
Updated on: 2023-06-06T10:01:39.614546+00:00