The big notice at the top of the release note is not interesting
to most users now and apparently comes across poorly to some.
Better to provide more information about what we do support.
This disentangles the script validation skipping from checkpoints.
A new option is introduced "assumevalid" which specifies a block whos
ancestors we assume all have valid scriptsigs and so we do not check
them when they are also burried under the best header by two weeks
worth of work.
Unlike checkpoints this has no influence on consensus unless you set
it to a block with an invalid history. Because of this it can be
easily be updated without risk of influencing the network consensus.
This results in a massive IBD speedup.
This approach was independently recommended by Peter Todd and Luke-Jr
since POW based signature skipping (see PR#9180) does not have the
verifiable properties of a specific hash and may create bad incentives.
The downside is that, like checkpoints, the defaults bitrot and older
releases will sync slower. On the plus side users can provide their
own value here, and if they set it to something crazy all that will
happen is more time will be spend validating signatures.
Checkblocks and checklevel are also moved to the hidden debug options:
Especially now that checkblocks has a low default there is little need
to change these settings, and users frequently misunderstand them as
influencing security or IBD speed. By hiding them we offset the
space added by this new option.
7982fce doc: Mention full UTF-8 support in release notes (Wladimir J. van der Laan)
6bbb4ef test: test utf-8 for labels in wallet (Wladimir J. van der Laan)
a406fcb test: add ensure_ascii setting to AuthServiceProxy (Wladimir J. van der Laan)
60ab9b2 Squashed 'src/univalue/' changes from 2740c4f..f32df99 (Wladimir J. van der Laan)
f154470 [contrib] Remove reference to sf and add doc to verify.sh (MarcoFalke)
182bec4 contrib: remove hardcoded version from verify.sh (Wladimir J. van der Laan)
c907f4d doc: Update release process (Wladimir J. van der Laan)
Adds 127.0.0.1:9050 for the .onion proxy if we can succesfully connect
to the control port.
Natural followup to creating hidden services automatically.
58ef0ff doc: update docs for Tor listening (Wladimir J. van der Laan)
68ccdc4 doc: Mention Tor listening in release notes (Wladimir J. van der Laan)
09c1ae1 torcontrol improvements and fixes (Wladimir J. van der Laan)
2f796e5 Better error message if Tor version too old (Peter Todd)
8f4e67f net: Automatically create hidden service, listen on Tor (Wladimir J. van der Laan)
af3208b Resolve issue 3166. These changes decode valid SIGHASH types on signatures in assembly (asm) representations of scriptSig scripts. This squashed commit incorporates substantial helpful feedback from jtimon, laanwj, and sipa. (mruddy)
Assume that when a wallet transaction has a valid block hash and transaction position
in it, the transaction is actually there. We're already trusting wallet data in a
much more fundamental way anyway.
To prevent backward compatibility issues, a new record is used for storing the
block locator in the wallet. Old wallets will see a wallet file synchronized up
to the genesis block, and rescan automatically.
These changes decode valid SIGHASH types on signatures in assembly (asm) representations of scriptSig scripts.
This squashed commit incorporates substantial helpful feedback from jtimon, laanwj, and sipa.
Add information about further notable changes:
- Big endian support
- Memory usage optimization
- Disable wallet transaction broadcast
- Stream isolation for Tor
Start the RPC server before doing all the (expensive) startup
initialisations like loading the block index. Until the node is ready,
return all calls immediately with a new error signalling "in warmup"
with an appropriate status message (similar to the init message).
This is useful for RPC clients to know that the server is there (e. g.,
they don't have to start it) but not yet available. It is used in
Namecoin and Huntercoin already for some time, and there exists a UI
hooked onto the RPC interface that actively uses this to its advantage.
The wallet now uses the mempool fee estimator with a new
command-line option: -txconfirmtarget (default: 1) instead
of using hard-coded fees or priorities.
A new bitcoind that hasn't seen enough transactions to estimate
will fall back to the old hard-coded minimum priority or
transaction fee.
-paytxfee option overrides -txconfirmtarget.
Relaying and mining code isn't changed.
For Qt, the coin control dialog now uses priority estimates to
label transaction priority (instead of hard-coded constants);
unspent outputs were consistently labeled with a much higher
priority than is justified by the free transactions actually
being accepted into blocks.
I did not implement any GUI for setting -txconfirmtarget; I would
suggest getting rid of the "Pay transaction fee" GUI and replace
it with either "target number of confirmations" or maybe
a "faster confirmation <--> lower fee" slider or select box.
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.
Now that 0.9 is branched off, the new release notes for 0.10 or 0.11 or
1.0 should be added here.
Edits to preliminary 0.9.0 release notes should be made in the 0.9.0 branch.
Gregory Maxwell