kevacoin/doc/release-notes.md

(note: this is a temporary file, to be added-to by anybody, and moved to release-notes at release time)

Bitcoin Core version 0.14.0 is now available from:

https://bitcoin.org/bin/bitcoin-core-0.14.0/

This is a new major version release, including new features, various bugfixes 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/

Compatibility

Bitcoin Core is extensively tested on multiple operating systems using the Linux kernel, macOS 10.8+, and Windows Vista and later.

Microsoft ended support for Windows XP on April 8th, 2014, No attempt is made to prevent installing or running the software on Windows XP, you can still do so at your own risk but be aware that there are known instabilities and issues. Please do not report issues about Windows XP to the issue tracker.

Bitcoin Core should also work on most other Unix-like systems but is not frequently tested on them.

Notable changes

Manual Pruning

Bitcoin Core has supported automatically pruning the blockchain since 0.11. Pruning the blockchain allows for significant storage space savings as the vast majority of the downloaded data can be discarded after processing so very little of it remains on the disk.

Manual block pruning can now be enabled by setting -prune=1. Once that is set, the RPC command pruneblockchain can be used to prune the blockchain up to the specified height or timestamp.

getinfo Deprecated

The getinfo RPC command has been deprecated. Each field in the RPC call has been moved to another command's output with that command also giving additional information that getinfo did not provide. The following table shows where each field has been moved to:

getinfo field	Moved to
"version"	getnetworkinfo()["version"]
"protocolversion"	getnetworkinfo()["protocolversion"]
"walletversion"	getwalletinfo()["walletversion"]
"balance"	getwalletinfo()["balance"]
"blocks"	getblockchaininfo()["blocks"]
"timeoffset"	getnetworkinfo()["timeoffset"]
"connections"	getnetworkinfo()["connections"]
"proxy"	getnetworkinfo()["networks"][0]["proxy"]
"difficulty"	getblockchaininfo()["difficulty"]
"testnet"	getblockchaininfo()["chain"] == "test"
"keypoololdest"	getwalletinfo()["keypoololdest"]
"keypoolsize"	getwalletinfo()["keypoolsize"]
"unlocked_until"	getwalletinfo()["unlocked_until"]
"paytxfee"	getwalletinfo()["paytxfee"]
"relayfee"	getnetworkinfo()["relayfee"]
"errors"	getnetworkinfo()["warnings"]

ZMQ On Windows

Previously the ZeroMQ notification system was unavailable on Windows due to various issues with ZMQ. These have been fixed upstream and now ZMQ can be used on Windows. Please see this document for help with using ZMQ in general.

Nested RPC Commands in Debug Console

The ability to nest RPC commands has been added to the debug console. This allows users to have the output of a command become the input to another command without running the commands separately.

The nested RPC commands use bracket syntax (i.e. getwalletinfo()) and can be nested (i.e. getblock(getblockhash(1))). Simple queries can be done with square brackets where object values are accessed with either an array index or a non-quoted string (i.e. listunspent()[0][txid]). Both commas and spaces can be used to separate parameters in both the bracket syntax and normal RPC command syntax.

Network Activity Toggle

A RPC command and GUI toggle have been added to enable or disable all p2p network activity. The network status icon in the bottom right hand corner is now the GUI toggle. Clicking the icon will either enable or disable all p2p network activity. If network activity is disabled, the icon will be grayed out with an X on top of it.

Additionally the setnetworkactive RPC command has been added which does the same thing as the GUI icon. The command takes one boolean parameter, true enables networking and false disables it.

Out-of-sync Modal Info Layer

When Bitcoin Core is out-of-sync on startup, a semi-transparent information layer will be shown over top of the normal display. This layer contains details about the current sync progress and estimates the amount of time remaining to finish syncing. This layer can also be hidden and subsequently unhidden by clicking on the progress bar at the bottom of the window.

Support for JSON-RPC Named Arguments

Commands sent over the JSON-RPC interface and through the bitcoin-cli binary can now use named arguments. This follows the JSON-RPC specification for passing parameters by-name with an object.

bitcoin-cli has been updated to support this by parsing name=value arguments when the -named option is given.

Some examples:

src/bitcoin-cli -named help command="help"
src/bitcoin-cli -named getblockhash height=0
src/bitcoin-cli -named getblock blockhash=000000000019d6689c085ae165831e934ff763ae46a2a6c172b3f1b60a8ce26f
src/bitcoin-cli -named sendtoaddress address="(snip)" amount="1.0" subtractfeefromamount=true

The order of arguments doesn't matter in this case. Named arguments are also useful to leave out arguments that should stay at their default value. The rarely-used arguments comment and comment_to to sendtoaddress, for example, can be left out. However, this is not yet implemented for many RPC calls, this is expected to land in a later release.

The RPC server remains fully backwards compatible with positional arguments.

Opt into RBF When Sending

A new startup option, -walletrbf, has been added to allow users to have all transactions sent opt into RBF support. The default value for this option is currently false, so transactions will not opt into RBF by default.

Sensitive Data Is No Longer Stored In Debug Console History

The debug console maintains a history of previously entered commands that can be accessed by pressing the Up-arrow key so that users can easily reuse previously entered commands. Commands which have sensitive information such as passphrases and private keys will now have a (...) in place of the parameters when accessed through the history.

Retaining the Mempool Across Restarts

The mempool will be saved to the data directory prior to shutdown to a mempool.dat file. This file preserves the mempool so that when the node restarts the mempool can be filled with transactions without waiting for new transactions to be created. This will also preserve any changes made to a transaction through commands such as prioritisetransaction so that those changes will not be lost.

Final Alert

The Alert System was disabled and deprecated in Bitcoin Core 0.12.1 and removed in 0.13.0. To Alert System was retired with a maximum sequence final alert which causes any nodes supporting the Alert System to display a static hard-coded "Alert Key Compromised" message which also prevents any other alerts from overriding it. This final alert is hard-coded into this release so that all old nodes receive the final alert.

GUI Changes

• After resetting the options by clicking the Reset Options button in the options dialog or with the -resetguioptions startup option, the user will be prompted to choose the data directory again. This is to ensure that custom data directories will be kept after the option reset which clears the custom data directory set via the choose datadir dialog.

• Multiple peers can now be selected in the list of peers in the debug window. This allows for users to ban or disconnect multiple peers simultaneously instead of banning them one at a time.

• An indicator has been added to the bottom right hand corner of the main window to indicate whether the wallet being used is a HD wallet. This icon will be grayed out with an X on top of it if the wallet is not a HD wallet.

Low-level RPC changes

• importprunedfunds only accepts two required arguments. Some versions accept an optional third arg, which was always ignored. Make sure to never pass more than two arguments.

• The first boolean argument to getaddednodeinfo has been removed. This is an incompatible change.

• RPC command "getmininginfo" loses the "testnet" field in favor of the more generic "chain" (which has been present for years).

• A new RPC command preciousblock has been added which marks a block as precious. A precious block will be treated as if it were received earlier than a competing block.

• A new RPC command importmulti has been added which receives an array of JSON objects representing the intention of importing a public key, a private key, an address and script/p2sh

• Use of getrawtransaction for retrieving confirmed transactions with unspent outputs has been deprecated. For now this will still work, but in the future it may change to only be able to retrieve information about transactions in the mempool or if txindex is enabled.

• A new RPC command getmemoryinfo has been added which will return information about the memory usage of Bitcoin Core. This was added in conjunction with optimizations to memory management. See Pull #8753 for more information.

HTTP REST Changes

• UTXO set query (GET /rest/getutxos/<checkmempool>/<txid>-<n>/<txid>-<n> /.../<txid>-<n>.<bin|hex|json>) responses were changed to return status code HTTP_BAD_REQUEST (400) instead of HTTP_INTERNAL_SERVER_ERROR (500) when requests contain invalid parameters.

Minimum Fee Rate Policies

Since the changes in 0.12 to automatically limit the size of the mempool and improve the performance of block creation in mining code it has not been important for relay nodes or miners to set -minrelaytxfee. With this release the following concepts that were tied to this option have been separated out:

• incremental relay fee used for calculating BIP 125 replacement and mempool limiting. (1000 satoshis/kB)
• calculation of threshold for a dust output. (effectively 3 * 1000 satoshis/kB)
• minimum fee rate of a package of transactions to be included in a block created by the mining code. If miners wish to set this minimum they can use the new -blockmintxfee option. (defaults to 1000 satoshis/kB)

The -minrelaytxfee option continues to exist but is recommended to be left unset.

Fee Estimation Changes

• Since 0.13.2 fee estimation for a confirmation target of 1 block has been disabled. The fee slider will no longer be able to choose a target of 1 block. This is only a minor behavior change as there was often insufficient data for this target anyway. estimatefee 1 will now always return -1 and estimatesmartfee 1 will start searching at a target of 2.

• The default target for fee estimation is changed to 6 blocks in both the GUI (previously 25) and for RPC calls (previously 2).

Removal of Priority Estimation

• Estimation of "priority" needed for a transaction to be included within a target number of blocks has been removed. The rpc calls are deprecated and will either return -1 or 1e24 appropriately. The format for fee_estimates.dat has also changed to no longer save these priority estimates. It will automatically be converted to the new format which is not readable by prior versions of the software.

• Support for "priority" (coin age) transaction sorting for mining is considered deprecated in Core and will be removed in the next major version. This is not to be confused with the prioritisetransaction RPC which will remain supported by Core for adding fee deltas to transactions.

P2P connection management

• Peers manually added through the -addnode option or addnode RPC now have their own limit of eight connections which does not compete with other inbound or outbound connection usage and is not subject to the limitation imposed by the -maxconnections option.

• New connections to manually added peers are performed more quickly.

0.14.0 Change log

Detailed release notes follow. This overview includes changes that affect behavior, not code moves, refactors and string updates. For convenience in locating the code changes and accompanying discussion, both the pull request and git merge commit are mentioned.

RPC and REST

Configuration and command-line options

Block and transaction handling

P2P protocol and network code

Validation

Build system

Wallet

GUI

Tests

Miscellaneous

Credits

Thanks to everyone who directly contributed to this release:

As well as everyone that helped translating on Transifex.