Author: Gavin Andresen 2013-02-19 19:27:50
Published on: 2013-02-19T19:27:50+00:00
Bitcoin-Qt version 0.8.0 is a major release that aims to improve performance and handle the increasing volume of transactions on the network. The Mac and Windows binaries are now signed with certificates owned by the Bitcoin Foundation, making them 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, while Berkeley DB is only used for the wallet.dat file. Pieter Wuille implemented several optimizations to the way transactions are verified, so a running, synchronized node uses less working 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. The release introduces "Bloom filter" support in the network protocol for sending only relevant transactions to lightweight clients. "Contrib/verifysfbinaries" is a shell-script to verify that the binary downloads at SourceForge have not been tampered with.In terms of changes, this 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. If you need that functionality, you must run once with -txindex=1 -reindex=1 to rebuild block-chain indices. "Contrib/spendfrom" is a python-language command-line utility that demonstrates how to use the "raw transactions" JSON-RPC API to send coins received from particular addresses. New JSON-RPC API features include lockunspent/listlockunspent, which allow locking transaction outputs for a period of time so they will not be spent by other processes that might be accessing the same wallet. Addnode/getaddednodeinfo methods are introduced to connect to specific peers without restarting. Importprivkey now takes an optional boolean parameter to control whether or not to rescan the blockchain for transactions after importing a new private key.Important bug fixes include a privacy leak where the position of the "change" output in most transactions was not being properly randomized, making network analysis of the transaction graph to identify users' wallets easier. The release also includes a bug fix that makes it a little bit more difficult for attackers to double-spend a certain type of zero-confirmation transaction. Users who are running an older version must shut it down before upgrading. 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. Users are encouraged to report bugs using the issue tracker at GitHub. Thanks to everybody who contributed to this release.
Updated on: 2023-06-06T10:10:27.586965+00:00