Author: Wladimir J. van der Laan 2016-10-27 18:42:35
Published on: 2016-10-27T18:42:35+00:00
Bitcoin Core version 0.13.1 has been released and is now available for download. The new release includes activation parameters for the segwit softfork, bugfixes, performance improvements and updated translations. However, Windows XP and OS X 10.7 are no longer supported from this version.Segregated witness (segwit) is a soft fork that will allow transaction-producing software to separate transaction signatures from the part of the data covered by txid, eliminating unwanted transaction malleability and increasing capacity. Segwit also provides more security for multisig, allows linear scaling of sighash operations, more efficient almost full-node security and script versioning. Nodes will begin tracking which blocks signal support for segwit at the beginning of the first retarget period after segwit's start date of November 15, 2016. If 95% of blocks within a 2,016-block retarget period signal support for segwit, the softfork will be locked in. Along with segwit, the null dummy softfork has been introduced to eliminate network issues related to "transaction malleability". Signaling for the null dummy softfork is done by signaling support for segwit and it will activate at the same time as segwit.The release includes low-level RPC changes, such as `importprunedfunds` only accepting two required arguments and ARM builds being experimental. Pre-built Linux ARM binaries were added to the set of uploaded executables, with additional detail on the ARM architecture targeted by each provided in the download directory or torrent. Consensus changes include the implementation of NULLDUMMY softfork (BIP147), adding NULLDUMMY verify flag in bitcoinconsensus.h, and defining start and end time for segwit deployment. RPC and other APIs have been updated with modifications to importprunedfunds, removal of createwitnessaddress RPC command, deprecation of getinfo, and more. Block and transaction handling have experienced several changes and improvements, including reducing default number of blocks to check at startup, adding policy limits and disabling uncompressed keys for segwit scripts, making non-minimal OP_IF/NOTIF argument non-standard for P2WSH, and precomputing sighashes. The release also includes changes to P2P protocol and network code, build system, GUI, wallet, tests and QA, and documentation. For example, Ping regularly in p2p-segwit.py to keep connection alive, splitting up slow RPC calls to avoid pruning test timeouts, fixing race conditions in p2p-compactblocks.py and sendheaders.py, and updating bips.md for Segregated Witness.The Bitcoin Core team has released the version 0.13.1 update of its software, which contains a range of improvements, bug fixes and security enhancements. The most notable changes are the introduction of Segregated Witness (SegWit), a new signature scheme that addresses transaction malleability, and other features including faster block validation times, fee estimation improvements and better privacy for lightweight wallets. The release also includes an updated list of BIPs, several node initialisation fixes, general code clean-up and numerous minor bug fixes. The complete list of contributors is available in the release notes.
Updated on: 2023-06-11T20:30:20.170725+00:00