Author: Wladimir J. van der Laan 2016-02-23 11:13:41
Published on: 2016-02-23T11:13:41+00:00
Bitcoin Core, the popular cryptocurrency software, recently released version 0.12.0 with a host of new features and improvements. One significant change is that transactions which do not meet the higher effective minimum relay fee will not be relayed or mined, even if they rank highly according to the priority heuristic. Mining of transactions based on their priority is also disabled by default. The update also includes various improvements to how the wallet calculates transaction fees, and it is now possible to use wallet functionality in pruned mode, reducing disk usage.Other changes include updates to the P2P protocol code and the command line options are now parsed strictly in the order in which they are specified. SSL support for RPC has been dropped from both the client and server. The mining code has also been updated, making it significantly faster and using less memory, including caching consensus-critical calculations on a transaction's acceptance into the mempool and relying on the consistency of the mempool to assemble blocks.The release notes for Bitcoin Core version 0.12.0 cover many areas, including P2P protocol and network code, validation, wallet, build system, and more. Some notable changes include limiting the mempool by throwing away the cheapest transaction and setting a minimum relay fee to it; improvements in sigcache efficiency and size; nSequence-based Full-RBF opt-in; lower default limits for tx chains; rolling bloom filter to keep track of recently rejected transactions; improved performance of addrman Select(); support for miniupnpc api version 14; connection slot exhaustion DoS mitigation; use of libsecp256k1-based ECDSA validation; switch to a constant-space Merkle root/branch algorithm; and watchonly support in fundrawtransaction.Bitcoin Core has since released two more updates: version 0.13.1 and version 0.12.1. Version 0.13.1 includes a fix for a bug that could cause transactions to stall or be delayed and updates to the graphical user interface (GUI) options. The release notes for version 0.13.1 also mention various testing, debugging, and benchmarking enhancements and improvements, as well as updates to the build system and Gitian.Version 0.12.1 is a maintenance release that fixes some bugs and includes minor improvements. Some key changes include the addition of ZeroMQ notifications, a simple benchmarking framework, and two python scripts for development tools. SanitizeString now allows hypen characters and timedata prevents warning overkill. A PGP signature is included for verification. The release was made possible by contributions from over 100 individuals, including translations on Transifex.
Updated on: 2023-06-11T04:05:48.754491+00:00