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://bitcoincore.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 7 and newer (Windows XP is not supported).
Bitcoin Core should also work on most other Unix-like systems but is not
frequently tested on them.
2015-05-26 21:32:25 +02:00
Notable changes
===============
RPC changes
------------
### Low-level changes
- The `createrawtransaction` RPC will now accept an array or dictionary (kept for compatibility) for the `outputs` parameter. This means the order of transaction outputs can be specified by the client.
- The `fundrawtransaction` RPC will reject the previously deprecated `reserveChangeKey` option.
- Wallet `getnewaddress` and `addmultisigaddress` RPC `account` named
parameters have been renamed to `label` with no change in behavior.
- Wallet `getlabeladdress`, `getreceivedbylabel`, `listreceivedbylabel`, and
`setlabel` RPCs have been added to replace `getaccountaddress`,
`getreceivedbyaccount`, `listreceivedbyaccount`, and `setaccount` RPCs,
which are now deprecated. There is no change in behavior between the
new RPCs and deprecated RPCs.
- Wallet `listreceivedbylabel`, `listreceivedbyaccount` and `listunspent` RPCs
add `label` fields to returned JSON objects that previously only had
`account` fields.
- `sendmany` now shuffles outputs to improve privacy, so any previously expected behavior with regards to output ordering can no longer be relied upon.
- The new RPC `testmempoolaccept` can be used to test acceptance of a transaction to the mempool without adding it.
External wallet files
---------------------
The `-wallet=<path>` option now accepts full paths instead of requiring wallets
to be located in the -walletdir directory.
Newly created wallet format
---------------------------
If `-wallet=<path>` is specified with a path that does not exist, it will now
create a wallet directory at the specified location (containing a wallet.dat
data file, a db.log file, and database/log.?????????? files) instead of just
creating a data file at the path and storing log files in the parent
directory. This should make backing up wallets more straightforward than
before because the specified wallet path can just be directly archived without
having to look in the parent directory for transaction log files.
For backwards compatibility, wallet paths that are names of existing data files
in the `-walletdir` directory will continue to be accepted and interpreted the
same as before.
Low-level RPC changes
---------------------
- When bitcoin is not started with any `-wallet=<path>` options, the name of
the default wallet returned by `getwalletinfo` and `listwallets` RPCs is
now the empty string `""` instead of `"wallet.dat"`. If bitcoin is started
with any `-wallet=<path>` options, there is no change in behavior, and the
name of any wallet is just its `<path>` string.
### Logging
- The log timestamp format is now ISO 8601 (e.g. "2018-02-28T12:34:56Z").
Miner block size removed
------------------------
The `-blockmaxsize` option for miners to limit their blocks' sizes was
deprecated in V0.15.1, and has now been removed. Miners should use the
`-blockmaxweight` option if they want to limit the weight of their blocks'
weights.
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Python Support
--------------
Support for Python 2 has been discontinued for all test files and tools.
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/).