easyNode for BTX 0.6.12 — mac · the v0.33.4.1 engine, and M5 Macs can start

Update before block 199,299. BTX changes a difficulty rule at that height. A node still on the old engine reads every block after it as invalid and stops there, exactly the way Linux nodes stopped at 191,713 in August. The chain is currently sitting still just below that line, so there is time, but not a lot of it.

The engine

Bundled engine is BTX v0.33.4.1, built here from the official release tag at commit 0d3e384f from a clean tree. We build it ourselves, as we have since 0.6.2, because BTX's own Mac download expects libraries from a developer tool most Macs do not have. The build in here needs nothing that is not already on your Mac.

We use the .1 tag on purpose. A node built from the plain v0.33.4 tag starts, syncs, and then quietly refuses to check anything, because it fails its own build integrity test with build_provenance_mismatch. The .1 release exists to fix that, and the build shipped here passes.

The newest Macs could not start the node, and now they can

BTX ships a reference measurement a Mac has to match before it will act as a full independent validator. That reference covers the M1 through the M4. It does not cover the M5, because the M5 arrived after it was published.

So on an M5 the node refused to start at all, and the app could only report that the node never became ready. No amount of waiting or reinstalling fixed it. This was true of 0.6.10 and 0.6.11 too, so if you have an M5 and gave up on the node earlier, this is why.

An M5 now follows the chain through the signed confirmation quorum instead, the same route a PC without a suitable graphics card already takes. It still checks blocks, transactions and balances itself. It delegates one specific proof to the operators who published a signature for it.

Two things about that decision. It is measured, never guessed: your Mac is asked to be a full validator on every start, and only the engine's own refusal moves it. And it is reconsidered on every engine update, so the day BTX publishes an M5 reference, your Mac goes back to being a full validator on its own.

A missing signing key

BTX confirms blocks with two independent signers, and a node needs both keys because they sign different blocks. We were shipping one of them plus an older one, and missing the second key BTX published on 20 August. A node missing a key rejects roughly half of what it receives.

All three keys ship now. That is safe because the threshold is one: an extra key can only widen what the node accepts and can never cause a rejection.

Notes

Confirmation counts rebuild after this update. This engine restarts the network's confirmation records under a new cryptographic context. Block height and balances are unaffected.

The screen may sit still for a few minutes after updating while the node reads the chain back in. It is working even when the number has not moved.

Downloads

file	what it is
BTX-Node_0.6.12_aarch64.dmg	manual install, Apple Silicon
BTX-Node_0.6.12_aarch64.app.tar.gz	what the in-app updater downloads
SHA256SUMS-node-0.6.12	checksums

Existing installs update themselves. Mac only; Linux and Windows stay on their current builds.