What to Expect – crypto.news

Soon, the community might be able to download a brand-new new upgrade to Bitcoin Core that is now being vetted and is in its final candidate stage. The impending Bitcoin Core major launch, Bitcoin Core 24.0, was covered by guests Aaron van Wirdum and Sjors Provoost in this episode called ‘Bitcoin, Explained.‘

A Routine Upgrade For Bitcoin

For the uninitiated, Bitcoin Core is the open source program that every Bitcoin full node must operate to be in sync with the network. In essence, it is the reference implementation of the Bitcoin protocol, and thus serves to define and determine the rules of the Bitcoin network. Bitcoin Core includes a transaction verification engine and connects to the network, giving the network high level of security, privacy, and stability.

Approximately every six months, the Bitcoin Core initiative releases a new major version of its program. The 24th major version is undergoing testing and is in the discharge candidate phase, so it can be launched at any moment. Van Wirdum and Provoost examine this podcast’s seven of the most massive modifications made in Bitcoin Core 24.0.

The method by which nodes install blocks when synchronising with the system has also been altered. Bitcoin Core 24.0 nodes will initially not keep these block headers to thwart a specific kind of resource depletion assault, in contrast to earlier versions of Bitcoin Core that only downloaded block headers to ensure that the blocks they downloaded had enough proof-of-work.

This should eventually eliminate any checkpoints in the Bitcoin Core software, according to Van Wirdum and Provoost.

They explain that users can now fully implement replace-by-fee (RBF) logic in Bitcoin Core 24.0. 

Until this point, the ‘first seen’ rule was used by Bitcoin Core nodes, which prevented competing deals from being acknowledged in the node’s memory pool (mempool) and transmitted to peers. Users can direct their nodes to approve and forward contradicting transactions starting with this forthcoming update if they have a greater fee than the previous transaction(s) they dispute against.

Van Wirdum and Provoost also mention software to convert legacy wallets to descriptor wallets, the first miniscript assistance, the common use of RBF when generating transactions, an enhanced unspent transaction output (UTXO) selection algorithm that randomises change yield amounts for added privacy, and a new ‘send all’ feature to invest a specific (set of) UTXOs fully.

The Edition’s Predecessor (23.0)

The same hosts in a previous episode highlighted seven modifications that were in the previous Bitcoin Core release:

A new tool to detect typos in bech32 addresses, the addition of support for Taproot in the wallet, the removal of the preference to connect with peers through port 8333, the extension of support for CJDNS, the inclusion of replace-by-fee transactions in the transaction fee estimation algorithm, the inclusion of statically defined tracepoints, and a new option to freeze specific UTXOs until a future date.

Finally, the pair explained how a bug in a software compiler had initially led to a bug in a previous edition of Bitcoin Core for Windows, providing an intriguing perspective on the difficulties with upstream dependents.