Now that 0.15 branch has been split off, master is 0.15.99 (pre-0.16).
Also clean out release notes.
Tree-SHA512: 160f712fae7bfc51e49e36a27ab01f5c243b79a19a70312df95f9bc5cb8067c70aa88911f741fd1625bee549a70655eaea24d98f6049d98c3c14ee1b3143f4cb
This makes the following changes:
* In undo data and the chainstate database, the transaction nVersion
field is removed from the data structures, always written as 0, and
ignored when reading.
* The definition of hash_serialized in gettxoutsetinfo is changed to no
longer incude the nVersion field. It is renamed to hash_serialized_2
to avoid confusion. The new definition also includes transaction
height and coinbase information, as this information was missing
before.
This depends on having a CHashVerifier-based undo data checksum
verifier.
Apart from changing the definition of serialized_hash, downgrading
after using this patch is supported, as no release ever used the value
of nVersion field in UTXO entries.
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.
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.
Wladimir J. van der Laan