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.
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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.
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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/>
How to Upgrade
==============
If you are running an older version, shut it down. Wait until it has completely
shut down (which might take a few minutes for older versions), then run the
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installer (on Windows) or just copy over `/Applications/Bitcoin-Qt` (on Mac)
or `bitcoind`/`bitcoin-qt` (on Linux).
The first time you run version 0.15.0, your chainstate database will be converted to a
new format, which will take anywhere from a few minutes to half an hour,
depending on the speed of your machine.
Note that the block database format also changed in version 0.8.0 and there is no
automatic upgrade code from before version 0.8 to version 0.15.0. Upgrading
directly from 0.7.x and earlier without redownloading the blockchain is not supported.
However, as usual, old wallet versions are still supported.
Downgrading warning
-------------------
The chainstate database for this release is not compatible with previous
releases, so if you run 0.15 and then decide to switch back to any
older version, you will need to run the old release with the `-reindex-chainstate`
option to rebuild the chainstate data structures in the old format.
If your node has pruning enabled, this will entail re-downloading and
processing the entire blockchain.
Compatibility
==============
Bitcoin Core is extensively tested on multiple operating systems using
the Linux kernel, macOS 10.8+, and Windows Vista and later. Windows XP is not supported.
Bitcoin Core should also work on most other Unix-like systems but is not
frequently tested on them.
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Notable changes
===============
GCC 4.8.x
--------------
The minimum version of GCC required to compile Bitcoin Core is now 4.8. No effort will be
made to support older versions of GCC. See discussion in issue #11732 for more information.
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HD-wallets by default
---------------------
Due to a backward-incompatible change in the wallet database, wallets created
with version 0.16.0 will be rejected by previous versions. Also, version 0.16.0
will only create hierarchical deterministic (HD) wallets.
Custom wallet directories
---------------------
The ability to specify a directory other than the default data directory in which to store
wallets has been added. An existing directory can be specified using the `-walletdir=<dir>`
argument. Wallets loaded via `-wallet` arguments must be in this wallet directory. Care should be taken
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when choosing a wallet directory location, as if it becomes unavailable during operation,
funds may be lost.
Default wallet directory change
--------------------------
On new installations (if the data directory doesn't exist), wallets will now be stored in a
new `wallets/` subdirectory inside the data directory. If this `wallets/` subdirectory
doesn't exist (i.e. on existing nodes), the current datadir root is used instead, as it was.
Low-level RPC changes
----------------------
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- The deprecated RPC `getinfo` was removed. It is recommended that the more specific RPCs are used:
* `getblockchaininfo`
* `getnetworkinfo`
* `getwalletinfo`
* `getmininginfo`
- The wallet RPC `getreceivedbyaddress` will return an error if called with an address not in the wallet.
Changed command-line options
-----------------------------
- `-debuglogfile=<file>` can be used to specify an alternative debug logging file.
Renamed script for creating JSON-RPC credentials
-----------------------------
The `share/rpcuser/rpcuser.py` script was renamed to `share/rpcauth/rpcauth.py`. This script can be
used to create `rpcauth` credentials for a JSON-RPC user.
- `dumpwallet` now includes hex-encoded scripts from the wallet in the dumpfile, and
`importwallet` now imports these scripts, but corresponding addresses may not be added
correctly or a manual rescan may be required to find relevant transactions.
Credits
=======
Thanks to everyone who directly contributed to this release:
As well as everyone that helped translating on [Transifex](https://www.transifex.com/projects/p/bitcoin/).