Quote from: achow101 on October 04, 2024, 11:39:57 PM

Bitcoin Core version 28.0 is now available from:

https://bitcoincore.org/bin/bitcoin-core-28.0/

This release includes new features, various bug fixes 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/

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 in some cases), then run the
installer (on Windows) or just copy over /Applications/Bitcoin-Qt (on macOS)
or bitcoind/bitcoin-qt (on Linux).

Upgrading directly from a version of Bitcoin Core that has reached its EOL is
possible, but it might take some time if the data directory needs to be migrated. Old
wallet versions of Bitcoin Core are generally supported.

Running Bitcoin Core binaries on macOS requires self signing.
<pre>cd /path/to/bitcoin-28.0/bin xattr -d com.apple.quarantine bitcoin-cli bitcoin-qt bitcoin-tx bitcoin-util bitcoin-wallet bitcoind test_bitcoin codesign -s - bitcoin-cli bitcoin-qt bitcoin-tx bitcoin-util bitcoin-wallet bitcoind test_bitcoin</pre>

Compatibility

Bitcoin Core is supported and extensively tested on operating systems
using the Linux Kernel 3.17+, macOS 11.0+, and Windows 7 and newer. Bitcoin
Core should also work on most other UNIX-like systems but is not as
frequently tested on them. It is not recommended to use Bitcoin Core on
unsupported systems.

Notable changes

Testnet4/BIP94 support

Support for Testnet4 as specified in BIP94
has been added. The network can be selected with the -testnet4 option and
the section header is also named [testnet4].

While the intention is to phase out support for Testnet3 in an upcoming
version, support for it is still available via the known options in this
release. (#29775)

Windows Data Directory

The default data directory on Windows has been moved from C:\Users\Username\AppData\Roaming\Bitcoin
to C:\Users\Username\AppData\Local\Bitcoin. Bitcoin Core will check the existence
of the old directory first and continue to use that directory for backwards
compatibility if it is present. (#27064)

JSON-RPC 2.0 Support

The JSON-RPC server now recognizes JSON-RPC 2.0 requests and responds with
strict adherence to the specification.
See JSON-RPC-interface.md for details. (#27101)

JSON-RPC clients may need to be updated to be compatible with the JSON-RPC server.
Please open an issue on GitHub if any compatibility issues are found.

libbitcoinconsensus Removal

The libbitcoin-consensus library was deprecated in 27.0 and is now completely removed. (#29648)

P2P and Network Changes

Previously if Bitcoin Core was listening for P2P connections, either using
default settings or via bind=addr:port it would always also bind to
127.0.0.1:8334 to listen for Tor connections. It was not possible to switch
this off, even if the node didn't use Tor. This has been changed and now
bind=addr:port results in binding on addr:port only. The default behavior
of binding to 0.0.0.0:8333 and 127.0.0.1:8334 has not been changed.

If you are using a bind=... configuration without bind=...=onion and rely
on the previous implied behavior to accept incoming Tor connections at
127.0.0.1:8334, you need to now make this explicit by using
bind=... bind=127.0.0.1:8334=onion. (#22729)
Bitcoin Core will now fail to start up if any of its P2P binds fail, rather
than the previous behaviour where it would only abort startup if all P2P
binds had failed. (#22729)
UNIX domain sockets can now be used for proxy connections. Set -onion or -proxy
to the local socket path with the prefix unix: (e.g. -onion=unix:/home/me/torsocket).
(#27375)
UNIX socket paths are now accepted for -zmqpubrawblock and -zmqpubrawtx with
the format -zmqpubrawtx=unix:/path/to/file (#27679)
Additional "in" and "out" flags have been added to -whitelist to control whether
permissions apply to inbound connections and/or manual ones (default: inbound only). (#27114)
Transactions having a feerate that is too low will be opportunistically paired with
their child transactions and submitted as a package, thus enabling the node to download
1-parent-1-child packages using the existing transaction relay protocol. Combined with
other mempool policies, this change allows limited "package relay" when a parent transaction
is below the mempool minimum feerate. Topologically Restricted Until Confirmation (TRUC)
parents are additionally allowed to be below the minimum relay feerate (i.e., pay 0 fees).
Use the submitpackage RPC to submit packages directly to the node. Warning: this P2P
feature is limited (unlike the submitpackage interface, a child with multiple unconfirmed
parents is not supported) and not yet reliable under adversarial conditions. (#28970)

Mempool Policy Changes

Transactions with version number set to 3 are now treated as standard on all networks (#29496),
subject to opt-in Topologically Restricted Until Confirmation (TRUC) transaction policy as
described in BIP 431. The
policy includes limits on spending unconfirmed outputs (#28948), eviction of a previous descendant
if a more incentive-compatible one is submitted (#29306), and a maximum transaction size of 10,000vB
(#29873). These restrictions simplify the assessment of incentive compatibility of accepting or
replacing TRUC transactions, thus ensuring any replacements are more profitable for the node and
making fee-bumping more reliable.
Pay To Anchor (P2A) is a new standard witness output type for spending,
a newly recognised output template. This allows for key-less anchor
outputs, with compact spending conditions for additional efficiencies on
top of an equivalent sh(OP_TRUE) output, in addition to the txid stability
of the spending transaction.
N.B. propagation of this output spending on the network will be limited
until a sufficient number of nodes on the network adopt this upgrade. (#30352)
Limited package RBF is now enabled, where the proposed conflicting package would result in
a connected component, aka cluster, of size 2 in the mempool. All clusters being conflicted
against must be of size 2 or lower. (#28984)
The default value of the -mempoolfullrbf configuration option has been changed from 0 to 1,
i.e. mempoolfullrbf=1. (#30493)

Updated RPCs

The dumptxoutset RPC now returns the UTXO set dump in a new and
improved format. Correspondingly, the loadtxoutset RPC now expects
this new format in the dumps it tries to load. Dumps with the old
format are no longer supported and need to be recreated using the
new format to be usable. (#29612)
AssumeUTXO mainnet parameters have been added for height 840,000.
This means the loadtxoutset RPC can now be used on mainnet with
the matching UTXO set from that height. (#28553)
The warnings field in getblockchaininfo, getmininginfo and
getnetworkinfo now returns all the active node warnings as an array
of strings, instead of a single warning. The current behaviour
can be temporarily restored by running Bitcoin Core with the configuration
option -deprecatedrpc=warnings. (#29845)
Previously when using the sendrawtransaction RPC and specifying outputs
that are already in the UTXO set, an RPC error code of -27 with the
message "Transaction already in block chain" was returned in response.
The error message has been changed to "Transaction outputs already in utxo set"
to more accurately describe the source of the issue. (#30212)
The default mode for the estimatesmartfee RPC has been updated from conservative to economical,
which is expected to reduce over-estimation for many users, particularly if Replace-by-Fee is an option.
For users that require high confidence in their fee estimates at the cost of potentially over-estimating,
the conservative mode remains available. (#30275)
RPC scantxoutset now returns 2 new fields in the "unspents" JSON array: blockhash and confirmations.
See the scantxoutset help for details. (#30515)
RPC submitpackage now allows 2 new arguments to be passed: maxfeerate and maxburnamount. See the
subtmitpackage help for details. (#28950)

Changes to wallet-related RPCs can be found in the Wallet section below.

Updated REST APIs

Parameter validation for /rest/getutxos has been improved by rejecting
truncated or overly large txids and malformed outpoint indices via raising
an HTTP_BAD_REQUEST "Parse error". These requests were previously handled
silently. (#30482, #30444)

Build System

GCC 11.1 or later, or Clang 16.0 or later,
are now required to compile Bitcoin Core. (#29091, #30263)
The minimum required glibc to run Bitcoin Core is now
2.31. This means that RHEL 8 and Ubuntu 18.04 (Bionic)
are no-longer supported. (#29987)
--enable-lcov-branch-coverage has been removed, given
incompatibilities between lcov version 1 & 2. LCOV_OPTS
should be used to set any options instead. (#30192)

Updated Settings

When running with -alertnotify, an alert can now be raised multiple
times instead of just once. Previously, it was only raised when unknown
new consensus rules were activated. Its scope has now been increased to
include all kernel warnings. Specifically, alerts will now also be raised
when an invalid chain with a large amount of work has been detected.
Additional warnings may be added in the future. (#30058)

Changes to GUI or wallet related settings can be found in the GUI or Wallet section below.

Wallet

The wallet now detects when wallet transactions conflict with the mempool. Mempool-conflicting
transactions can be seen in the "mempoolconflicts" field of gettransaction. The inputs
of mempool-conflicted transactions can now be respent without manually abandoning the
transactions when the parent transaction is dropped from the mempool, which can cause wallet
balances to appear higher. (#27307)
A new max_tx_weight option has been added to the RPCs fundrawtransaction, walletcreatefundedpsbt, and send.
It specifies the maximum transaction weight. If the limit is exceeded during funding, the transaction will not be built.
The default value is 4,000,000 WU. (#29523)
A new createwalletdescriptor RPC allows users to add new automatically generated
descriptors to their wallet. This can be used to upgrade wallets created prior to the
introduction of a new standard descriptor, such as taproot. (#29130)
A new RPC gethdkeys lists all of the BIP32 HD keys in use by all of the descriptors in the wallet.
These keys can be used in conjunction with createwalletdescriptor to create and add single key
descriptors to the wallet for a particular key that the wallet already knows. (#29130)
The sendall RPC can now spend unconfirmed change and will include additional fees as necessary
for the resulting transaction to bump the unconfirmed transactions' feerates to the specified feerate. (#28979)
In RPC bumpfee, if a fee_rate is specified, the feerate is no longer restricted
to following the wallet's incremental feerate of 5 sat/vb. The feerate must still be
at least the sum of the original fee and the mempool's incremental feerate. (#27969)

GUI Changes

The "Migrate Wallet" menu allows users to migrate any legacy wallet in their wallet
directory, regardless of the wallets loaded. (gui#824)
The "Information" window now displays the maximum mempool size along with the
mempool usage. (gui#825)

Low-level Changes

Tests

The BIP94 timewarp attack mitigation is now active on the regtest network. (#30681)
A new -testdatadir option has been added to test_bitcoin to allow specifying the
location of unit test data directories. (#26564)

Blockstorage

Block files are now XOR'd by default with a key stored in the blocksdir.
Previous releases of Bitcoin Core or previous external software will not be able to read the blocksdir with a non-zero XOR-key.
Refer to the -blocksxor help for more details. (#28052)

Chainstate

The chainstate database flushes that occur when blocks are pruned will no longer
empty the database cache. The cache will remain populated longer, which significantly
reduces the time for initial block download to complete. (#28280)

Dependencies

The dependency on Boost.Process has been replaced with cpp-subprocess, which is contained in source.
Builders will no longer need Boost.Process to build with external signer support. (#28981)

Credits

Thanks to everyone who directly contributed to this release:

0xb10c
Alfonso Roman Zubeldia
Andrew Toth
AngusP
Anthony Towns
Antoine Poinsot
Anton A
Ava Chow
Ayush Singh
Ben Westgate
Brandon Odiwuor
brunoerg
bstin
Charlie
Christopher Bergqvist
Cory Fields
crazeteam
Daniela Brozzoni
David Gumberg
dergoegge
Edil Medeiros
Epic Curious
Fabian Jahr
fanquake
furszy
glozow
Greg Sanders
hanmz
Hennadii Stepanov
Her how are people categories here do will have staff major and minor staff
laanwj
Larry Ruane
Lőrinc
Luis Schwab
Luke Dashjr
MarcoFalke
marcofleon
Marnix
Martin Saposnic
Martin Zumsande
Matt Corallo
Matthew Zipkin
Matt Whitlock
Max Edwards
Michael Dietz
Murch
nanlour
pablomartin4btc
Peter Todd
Pieter Wuille
@RandyMcMillan
RoboSchmied
Roman Zeyde
Ryan Ofsky
Sebastian Falbesoner
Sergi Delgado Segura
Sjors Provoost
spicyzboss
StevenMia
stickies-v
stratospher
Suhas Daftuar
sunerok
tdb3
TheCharlatan
umiumi
Vasil Dimov
virtu
willcl-ark

As well as to everyone that helped with translations on
Transifex.

Newcity2660

Posts

Merits