lbrycrd/doc/release-notes.md

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(note: this is a temporary file, to be added-to by anybody, and moved to
release-notes at release time)
estimatefee / estimatepriority RPC methods New RPC methods: return an estimate of the fee (or priority) a transaction needs to be likely to confirm in a given number of blocks. Mike Hearn created the first version of this method for estimating fees. It works as follows: For transactions that took 1 to N (I picked N=25) blocks to confirm, keep N buckets with at most 100 entries in each recording the fees-per-kilobyte paid by those transactions. (separate buckets are kept for transactions that confirmed because they are high-priority) The buckets are filled as blocks are found, and are saved/restored in a new fee_estiamtes.dat file in the data directory. A few variations on Mike's initial scheme: To estimate the fee needed for a transaction to confirm in X buckets, all of the samples in all of the buckets are used and a median of all of the data is used to make the estimate. For example, imagine 25 buckets each containing the full 100 entries. Those 2,500 samples are sorted, and the estimate of the fee needed to confirm in the very next block is the 50'th-highest-fee-entry in that sorted list; the estimate of the fee needed to confirm in the next two blocks is the 150'th-highest-fee-entry, etc. That algorithm has the nice property that estimates of how much fee you need to pay to get confirmed in block N will always be greater than or equal to the estimate for block N+1. It would clearly be wrong to say "pay 11 uBTC and you'll get confirmed in 3 blocks, but pay 12 uBTC and it will take LONGER". A single block will not contribute more than 10 entries to any one bucket, so a single miner and a large block cannot overwhelm the estimates.
2014-03-17 13:19:54 +01:00
Bitcoin Core version *version* is now available from:
<https://bitcoin.org/bin/bitcoin-core-*version*/>
This is a new major version release, including new features, various bugfixes
and performance improvements, as well as updated translations.
Please report bugs using the issue tracker at github:
<https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/issues>
To receive security and update notifications, please subscribe to:
<https://bitcoincore.org/en/list/announcements/join/>
Compatibility
==============
Microsoft ended support for Windows XP on [April 8th, 2014](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/WindowsForBusiness/end-of-xp-support),
an OS initially released in 2001. This means that not even critical security
updates will be released anymore. Without security updates, using a bitcoin
wallet on a XP machine is irresponsible at least.
In addition to that, with 0.12.x there have been varied reports of Bitcoin Core
randomly crashing on Windows XP. It is [not clear](https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/issues/7681#issuecomment-217439891)
what the source of these crashes is, but it is likely that upstream
libraries such as Qt are no longer being tested on XP.
We do not have time nor resources to provide support for an OS that is
end-of-life. From 0.13.0 on, Windows XP is no longer supported. Users are
suggested to upgrade to a newer verion of Windows, or install an alternative OS
that is supported.
No attempt is made to prevent installing or running the software on Windows XP,
you can still do so at your own risk, but do not expect it to work: do not
report issues about Windows XP to the issue tracker.
2015-05-26 21:32:25 +02:00
Notable changes
===============
Example item
----------------
bitcoin-cli: arguments privacy
--------------------------------
The RPC command line client gained a new argument, `-stdin`
to read extra arguments from standard input, one per line until EOF/Ctrl-D.
For example:
$ echo -e "mysecretcode\n120" | src/bitcoin-cli -stdin walletpassphrase
It is recommended to use this for sensitive information such as wallet
passphrases, as command-line arguments can usually be read from the process
table by any user on the system.
RPC low-level changes
----------------------
- `gettxoutsetinfo` UTXO hash (`hash_serialized`) has changed. There was a divergence between
32-bit and 64-bit platforms, and the txids were missing in the hashed data. This has been
fixed, but this means that the output will be different than from previous versions.
- Full UTF-8 support in the RPC API. Non-ASCII characters in, for example,
wallet labels have always been malformed because they weren't taken into account
properly in JSON RPC processing. This is no longer the case. This also affects
the GUI debug console.
C++11 and Python 3
-------------------
Various code modernizations have been done. The Bitcoin Core code base has
started using C++11. This means that a C++11-capable compiler is now needed for
building. Effectively this means GCC 4.7 or higher, or Clang 3.3 or higher.
When cross-compiling for a target that doesn't have C++11 libraries, configure with
`./configure --enable-glibc-back-compat ... LDFLAGS=-static-libstdc++`.
For running the functional tests in `qa/rpc-tests`, Python3.4 or higher is now
required.
Linux ARM builds
------------------
Due to popular request, Linux ARM builds have been added to the uploaded
executables.
The following extra files can be found in the download directory or torrent:
- `bitcoin-${VERSION}-arm-linux-gnueabihf.tar.gz`: Linux binaries for the most
common 32-bit ARM architecture.
- `bitcoin-${VERSION}-aarch64-linux-gnu.tar.gz`: Linux binaries for the most
common 64-bit ARM architecture.
ARM builds are still experimental. If you have problems on a certain device or
Linux distribution combination please report them on the bug tracker, it may be
possible to resolve them.
Note that Android is not considered ARM Linux in this context. The executables
are not expected to work out of the box on Android.
0.13.0 Change log
=================
Detailed release notes follow. This overview includes changes that affect
behavior, not code moves, refactors and string updates. For convenience in locating
the code changes and accompanying discussion, both the pull request and
git merge commit are mentioned.
### RPC and REST
Asm script outputs now contain OP_CHECKLOCKTIMEVERIFY in place of OP_NOP2
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
OP_NOP2 has been renamed to OP_CHECKLOCKTIMEVERIFY by [BIP
65](https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0065.mediawiki)
The following outputs are affected by this change:
- RPC `getrawtransaction` (in verbose mode)
- RPC `decoderawtransaction`
- RPC `decodescript`
- REST `/rest/tx/` (JSON format)
- REST `/rest/block/` (JSON format when including extended tx details)
- `bitcoin-tx -json`
2016-05-17 15:01:12 +02:00
New mempool information RPC calls
---------------------------------
RPC calls have been added to output detailed statistics for individual mempool
entries, as well as to calculate the in-mempool ancestors or descendants of a
transaction: see `getmempoolentry`, `getmempoolancestors`, `getmempooldescendants`.
### ZMQ
Each ZMQ notification now contains an up-counting sequence number that allows
listeners to detect lost notifications.
The sequence number is always the last element in a multi-part ZMQ notification and
therefore backward compatible.
Each message type has its own counter.
(https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/7762)
### Configuration and command-line options
### Block and transaction handling
### P2P protocol and network code
2016-03-18 20:11:27 +01:00
The p2p alert system has been removed in #7692 and the 'alert' message is no longer supported.
2016-03-04 22:25:19 +01:00
Fee filtering of invs (BIP 133)
------------------------------------
The optional new p2p message "feefilter" is implemented and the protocol
version is bumped to 70013. Upon receiving a feefilter message from a peer,
a node will not send invs for any transactions which do not meet the filter
feerate. [BIP 133](https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0133.mediawiki)
### Validation
### Build system
### Wallet
Hierarchical Deterministic Key Generation
-----------------------------------------
Newly created wallets will use hierarchical deterministic key generation
according to BIP32 (keypath m/0'/0'/k').
Existing wallets will still use traditional key generation.
Backups of HD wallets, regardless of when they have been created, can
therefore be used to re-generate all possible private keys, even the
ones which haven't already been generated during the time of the backup.
HD key generation for new wallets can be disabled by `-usehd=0`. Keep in
mind that this flag only has affect on newly created wallets.
You can't disable HD key generation once you have created a HD wallet.
There is no distinction between internal (change) and external keys.
[Pull request](https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/8035/files), [BIP 32](https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0032.mediawiki)
### GUI
### Tests
### Miscellaneous