Author: Wladimir J. van der Laan 2015-07-12 17:13:32
Published on: 2015-07-12T17:13:32+00:00
Bitcoin Core developers have released version 0.11.0 of the software, which includes several changes to the codebase. The update features a new fee estimator to help users more accurately calculate transaction fees. It also includes a privacy feature called stream isolation for Tor, which is on by default but can be disabled using "-proxyrandomize=0". Other features include autoprune functionality (-prune), the ability to disable wallet transaction broadcast (using "-walletbroadcast=0"), and an option to opt out of the alert system (-alerts). Notably, this release supports running a fully validating node without maintaining a copy of the raw block and undo data on disk through block file pruning. The user specifies how much space to allot for block and undo files. Block pruning works during initial sync in the same way as during steady-state by deleting block files "as you go" whenever disk space is allocated. However, it's important to note that block pruning is currently incompatible with running a wallet due to the fact that block data is used for rescanning the wallet and importing keys or addresses (which require a rescan). Also, block pruning is incompatible with -txindex and will automatically disable it.The update also includes several bug fixes, including one that prevented seed nodes from being added to the list of known peers in some cases. Additionally, experimental support for big-endian CPU architectures was added in this release. In terms of privacy, an option "-walletbroadcast=0" has been added to prevent automatic transaction broadcast and rebroadcast. One such application is selective Tor usage, where the node runs on the normal internet but transactions are broadcasted over Tor. This release adds functionality to create a new circuit for every peer connection when the software is used with Tor. The new option, "-proxyrandomize," is on by default.The algorithm used for fee estimation has been improved where -1 was returned when there was insufficient data to give an estimate, but now -1 will also be returned when there is no fee or priority high enough for the desired confirmation target. In those cases, it can help to ask for an estimate for a higher target number of blocks. At the time of this release, the P2P network is being flooded with low-fee transactions, causing a ballooning of the mempool size. It is possible to change a few configuration options to work around this, including increasing the minimum transaction relay fee minrelaytxfee, which defaults to 0.00001, and restricting the relaying of free transactions with limitfreerelay.The release notes detail changes to RPC and REST, including adding scriptPubKey field to validateaddress RPC call, adding time offset into getpeerinfo output, showing zero value txouts in listunspent, reporting missing inputs in sendrawtransaction, and showing script verification errors in signrawtransaction result. The entire distribution is also available as a torrent. Upgrading procedures have been provided, and users are warned that if they want to downgrade smoothly, they should make a backup of their entire data directory.Furthermore, the release notes for Bitcoin Core version 0.11.1 contain a list of changes, including bug fixes and improvements to the software's architecture. Some of these changes include script edge condition tests, updates to libsecp256k1, removing instances of uint256/uint160 in favor of opaque blobs, adding more multisig rpc tests, and adding a lightweight task scheduler. Additionally, the release includes an updated list of implemented BIPs, and a bitcoin-cli man page. The credits section recognizes all contributors to the software, as well as those who provided code review and security research.
Updated on: 2023-06-10T02:27:02.745500+00:00