0.8.3 Release notes

Truncate over-size messages to prevent a memory exhaustion attack.

Fix a regression that causes excessive re-writing of the peers.dat file.

0.8.2 Release notes

Fee Policy changes

The default fee for low-priority transactions is lowered from 0.0005 BTC (for each 1,000 bytes in the transaction; an average transaction is about 500 bytes) to 0.0001 BTC.

Payments (transaction outputs) of 0.543 times the minimum relay fee (0.00005430 BTC) are now considered ‘non-standard’, because storing them costs the network more than they are worth and spending them will usually cost their owner more in transaction fees than they are worth.

Non-standard transactions are not relayed across the network, are not included in blocks by most miners, and will not show up in your wallet until they are included in a block.

The default fee policy can be overridden using the -mintxfee and -minrelaytxfee command-line options, but note that we intend to replace the hard-coded fees with code that automatically calculates and suggests appropriate fees in the 0.9 release and note that if you set a fee policy significantly different from the rest of the network your transactions may never confirm.

Bitcoin-Qt changes

• New icon and splash screen
• Improve reporting of synchronization process
• Remove hardcoded fee recommendations
• Improve metadata of executable on MacOSX and Windows
• Move export button to individual tabs instead of toolbar
• Add “send coins” command to context menu in address book
• Add “copy txid” command to copy transaction IDs from transaction overview
• Save & restore window size and position when showing & hiding window
• New translations: Arabic (ar), Bosnian (bs), Catalan (ca), Welsh (cy), Esperanto (eo), Interlingua (la), Latvian (lv) and many improvements to current translations

MacOSX:

• OSX support for click-to-pay (bitcoin:) links
• Fix GUI disappearing problem on MacOSX (issue #1522)

Linux/Unix:

• Copy addresses to middle-mouse-button clipboard

Command-line options

• -walletnotify will call a command on receiving transactions that affect the wallet.
• -alertnotify will call a command on receiving an alert from the network.
• -par now takes a negative number, to leave a certain amount of cores free.

JSON-RPC API changes

• fixed a getblocktemplate bug that caused excessive CPU creating blocks.
• listunspent now lists account and address infromation.
• getinfo now also returns the time adjustment estimated from your peers.
• getpeerinfo now returns bytessent, bytesrecv and syncnode.
• gettxoutsetinfo returns statistics about the unspent transaction output database.
• gettxout returns information about a specific unspent transaction output.

Networking changes

• Significant changes to the networking code, reducing latency and memory consumption.
• Avoid initial block download stalling.
• Remove IRC seeding support.
• Performance tweaks.
• Added testnet DNS seeds.

Wallet compatibility/rescuing

• Cases where wallets cannot be opened in another version/installation should be reduced.
• -salvagewallet now works for encrypted wallets.

Known Bugs

• Entering the getblocktemplate or getwork RPC commands into the Bitcoin-Qt debug console will cause Bitcoin-Qt to crash. Run Bitcoin-Qt with the -server command-line option to workaround.

Thanks to everybody who contributed to the 0.8.2 and 0.8.3 releases!

• APerson241
• Andrew Poelstra
• Calvin Owens
• Chuck LeDuc Díaz
• Colin Dean
• David Griffith
• David Serrano
• Eric Lombrozo
• Gavin Andresen
• Gregory Maxwell
• Jeff Garzik
• Jonas Schnelli
• Larry Gilbert
• Luke Dashjr
• Matt Corallo
• Michael Ford
• Mike Hearn
• Patrick Brown
• Peter Todd
• Philip Kaufmann
• Pieter Wuille
• Richard Schwab
• Roman Mindalev
• Scott Howard
• Tariq Bashir
• Warren Togami
• Wladimir J. van der Laan
• freewil
• gladoscc
• kjj2
• mb300sd
• super3