release-notes.md

23.0 Release Notes

Bitcoin Knots version 23.0.knots20220529 is now available from:

https://bitcoinknots.org/files/23.x/23.0.knots20220529/

This release includes new features, various bug fixes and performance improvements, as well as updated translations.

Please report bugs using the issue tracker at GitHub:

https://github.com/bitcoinknots/bitcoin/issues

To receive security and update notifications, please subscribe to:

https://bitcoinknots.org/list/announcements/join/

How to Upgrade

If you are running an older version, shut it down. Wait until it has completely shut down (which might take a few minutes in some cases), then run the installer (on Windows) or just copy over /Applications/Bitcoin-Qt (on Mac) or bitcoind/bitcoin-qt (on Linux).

Upgrading directly from very old versions of Bitcoin Core or Knots is possible, but it might take some time if the data directory needs to be migrated. Old wallet versions of Bitcoin Knots are generally supported.

If you need to ensure your prior transaction mempool is preserved across the upgrade (usually you don't), be sure you upgrade to and open Knots 0.21.1 prior to upgrading to 22.0 or later.

Compatibility

Bitcoin Knots is supported on operating systems using the Linux kernel, macOS 10.15+, and Windows 7 and newer. It is not recommended to use Bitcoin Knots on unsupported systems.

Notable changes

P2P and network changes

• A bitcoind node will no longer rumour addresses to inbound peers by default. They will become eligible for address gossip after sending an ADDR, ADDRV2, or GETADDR message. (#21528)

• Before this release, Bitcoin Knots had a strong preference to try to connect only to peers that listen on port 8333. As a result of that, Bitcoin nodes listening on non-standard ports would likely not get any Bitcoin Knots peers connecting to them. This preference has been removed. (#23542)

• Full support has been added for the CJDNS network. See the new option -cjdnsreachable and doc/cjdns.md (#23077)

Fee estimation changes

• Fee estimation now takes the feerate of replacement (RBF) transactions into account. (#22539)

Rescan startup parameter removed

The -rescan startup parameter has been removed. Wallets which require rescanning due to corruption will still be rescanned on startup. Otherwise, please use the rescanblockchain RPC to trigger a rescan. (#23123)

Tracepoints and Userspace, Statically Defined Tracing support

Bitcoin Knots release binaries for Linux now include experimental tracepoints which act as an interface for process-internal events. These can be used for review, debugging, monitoring, and more. The tracepoint API is semi-stable. While the API is tested, process internals might change between releases requiring changes to the tracepoints. Information about the existing tracepoints can be found under doc/tracing.md and usage examples are provided in contrib/tracing/.

Updated RPCs

• The -deprecatedrpc=addresses configuration option has been removed. RPCs gettxout, getrawtransaction, decoderawtransaction, decodescript, gettransaction verbose=true and REST endpoints /rest/tx, /rest/getutxos, /rest/block no longer return the addresses and reqSigs fields, which were previously deprecated in 22.0. (#22650)

• The top-level fee fields fee, modifiedfee, ancestorfees and descendantfees returned by RPCs getmempoolentry,getrawmempool(verbose=true), getmempoolancestors(verbose=true) and getmempooldescendants(verbose=true) are deprecated and will be removed in the next major version (use -deprecated=fees if needed in this version). The same fee fields can be accessed through the fees object in the result. WARNING: deprecated fields ancestorfees and descendantfees are denominated in sats, whereas all fields in the fees object are denominated in BTC. (#22689)

• The return value of the pruneblockchain method had an off-by-one bug, returning the height of the block after the most recent pruned. This has been corrected, and it now returns the height of the last pruned block as documented.

• A new require_checksum option has been added to the deriveaddress method to allow for specifying descriptors without first calculating a checksum for them. (#24162)

Changes to wallet related RPCs can be found in the Wallet section below.

New RPCs

• Information on soft fork status has been moved from getblockchaininfo to the new getdeploymentinfo RPC which allows querying soft fork status at any block, rather than just at the chain tip. Inclusion of soft fork status in getblockchaininfo can currently be restored using the configuration -deprecatedrpc=softforks, but this will be removed in a future release. Note that in either case, the status field now reflects the status of the current block rather than the next block. (#23508)

• The sendall RPC spends specific UTXOs to one or more recipients without creating change. By default, the sendall RPC will spend every UTXO in the wallet. sendall is useful to empty wallets or to create a changeless payment from select UTXOs. When creating a payment from a specific amount for which the recipient incurs the transaction fee, continue to use the subtractfeefromamount option via the send, sendtoaddress, or sendmany RPCs. (#24118)

• A new gettxspendingprevout RPC has been added, which scans the mempool to find transactions spending any of the given outpoints. (#24408)

Files

• On startup, the list of banned hosts and networks (via setban RPC) in banlist.dat is ignored and only banlist.json is considered. Bitcoin Knots version 22.x is the only version that can read banlist.dat and also write it to banlist.json. If banlist.json already exists, version 22.x will not try to translate the banlist.dat into json. After an upgrade, listbanned can be used to double check the parsed entries. (#22570)

Updated settings

• -maxuploadtarget now allows human readable byte units [k|K|m|M|g|G|t|T]. E.g. -maxuploadtarget=500g. No whitespace, +- or fractions allowed. Default is M if no suffix provided. (#23249)

Tools and Utilities

• Update -getinfo to return data in a user-friendly format that also reduces vertical space. (#21832)

• CLI -addrinfo now returns a single field for the number of onion addresses known to the node instead of separate torv2 and torv3 fields, as support for Tor V2 addresses was removed from Bitcoin Knots in 22.0. (#22544)

Wallet

• Descriptor wallets are now the default wallet type. Newly created wallets will use descriptors unless descriptors=false is set during createwallet, or the Descriptor wallet checkbox is unchecked in the GUI.

  Note that wallet RPC commands like importmulti and dumpprivkey cannot be used with descriptor wallets, so if your client code relies on these commands without specifying descriptors=false during wallet creation, you will need to update your code.

• Newly created descriptor wallets will contain an automatically generated tr() descriptor which allows for creating single key Taproot receiving addresses.

• upgradewallet will now automatically flush the keypool if upgrading from a non-HD wallet to an HD wallet, to immediately start using the newly-generated HD keys. (#23093)

• a new RPC newkeypool has been added, which will flush (entirely clear and refill) the keypool. (#23093)

• lockunspent now optionally takes a third parameter, persistent, which causes the lock to be written persistently to the wallet database. This allows UTXOs to remain locked even after node restarts or crashes. (#23065)

• receivedby RPCs now include coinbase transactions. Previously, the following wallet RPCs excluded coinbase transactions: getreceivedbyaddress, getreceivedbylabel, listreceivedbyaddress, listreceivedbylabel. This release changes this behaviour and returns results accounting for received coins from coinbase outputs. The previous behaviour can be restored using the configuration -deprecatedrpc=exclude_coinbase, but may be removed in a future release. (#14707)

• A new option in the same receivedby RPCs, include_immature_coinbase (default=false), determines whether to account for immature coinbase transactions. Immature coinbase transactions are coinbase transactions that have 100 or fewer confirmations, and are not spendable. (#14707)

• The following RPCs: listtransactions, gettransaction and listsinceblock now include the wtxid of the transaction. (#24198)

• The listtransactions, gettransaction, and listsinceblock RPC methods now include a wtxid field (hash of serialized transaction, including witness data) for each transaction.

• A new gettxspendingprevout RPC has been added, which scans the mempool to find transactions spending any of the given outpoints. (#24408)

• The fundrawtransaction, send, and walletcreatefundedpsbt RPC methods now accept minconf and maxconf options to limit selection of inputs to UTXOs with a range of blocks confirmed. The previous min_conf option which served the same purpose is deprecated and may be removed in a future version. (#22049)

• The fundrawtransaction RPC method accepts a new segwit_inputs_only option to limit inputs to only segwit UTXOs. (#25183)

GUI changes

• UTXOs which are locked via the GUI are now stored persistently in the wallet database, so are not lost on node shutdown or crash. (#23065)

• The Bech32 checkbox has been replaced with a dropdown for all address types, including the new Bech32m (BIP-350) standard for Taproot enabled wallets.

• The network traffic graph can be switched between linear and non-linear views by clicking on the graph. Moving the mouse over the graph will show precise time and traffic info for a specific point. (gui#473, gui#492)

Low-level changes

Tests

• For the regtest network the activation heights of several softforks were set to block height 1. They can be changed by the runtime setting -testactivationheight=name@height. (#22818)

Credits

Thanks to everyone who directly contributed to this release:

• 0xb10c
• 0xree
• Aaron Clauson
• Adrian-Stefan Mares
• agroce
• aitorjs
• Alex Groce
• amadeuszpawlik
• Amiti Uttarwar
• Andrew Chow
• Andrew Poelstra
• Andrew Toth
• anouar kappitou
• Anthony Towns
• Antoine Poinsot
• Arnab Sen
• Aurèle Oulès
• avirgovi
• Ben Woosley
• benthecarman
• Bitcoin Hodler
• BitcoinTsunami
• brianddk
• Bruno Garcia
• CallMeMisterOwl
• Calvin Kim
• Carl Dong
• Cory Fields
• Cuong V. Nguyen
• Darius Parvin
• Dhruv Mehta
• Dimitri Deijs
• Dimitris Apostolou
• Dmitry Goncharov
• Douglas Chimento
• eugene
• Fabian Jahr
• fanquake
• Florian Baumgartl
• fyquah
• Gleb Naumenko
• glozow
• Gregory Sanders
• Heebs
• Hennadii Stepanov
• hg333
• HiLivin
• Igor Cota
• ishaanam
• Jadi
• James O'Beirne
• Jameson Lopp
• Jarol Rodriguez
• Jeremy Rand
• Jeremy Rubin
• Joan Karadimov
• John Newbery
• Jon Atack
• Jonas Schnelli
• João Barbosa
• josibake
• Juan Pablo Civile
• junderw
• Karl-Johan Alm
• katesalazar
• Kennan Mell
• Kiminuo
• Kittywhiskers Van Gogh
• Klement Tan
• Kristaps Kaupe
• Kuro
• Larry Ruane
• lsilva01
• lucash-dev
• Luke Dashjr
• MarcoFalke
• Martin Leitner-Ankerl
• Martin Zumsande
• Matt Corallo
• Matt Whitlock
• MeshCollider
• Michael Dietz
• Murch
• naiza
• Nathan Garabedian
• Nelson Galdeman
• NikhilBartwal
• Niklas Gögge
• node01
• nthumann
• Pasta
• Patrick Kamin
• Pavel Safronov
• Pavol Rusnak
• Perlover
• Peter Bushnell
• Pieter Wuille
• practicalswift
• pradumnasaraf
• pranabp-bit
• Prateek Sancheti
• Prayank
• R E Broadley
• Rafael Sadowski
• rajarshimaitra
• randymcmillan
• ritickgoenka
• Rob Fielding
• Rojar Smith
• Russell Yanofsky
• Ryan Ofsky
• S3RK
• Saibato
• Samuel Dobson
• sanket1729
• seaona
• Sebastian Falbesoner
• sh15h4nk
• Shashwat
• Shorya
• ShubhamPalriwala
• Shubhankar Gambhir
• Sjors Provoost
• sogoagain
• sstone
• stratospher
• Suhail Saqan
• Suhas Daftuar
• Suriyaa Rocky Sundararuban
• Taeik Lim
• TheCharlatan
• Tim Ruffing
• Tobin Harding
• Troy Giorshev
• Tyler Chambers
• Vasil Dimov
• W. J. van der Laan
• w0xlt
• willcl-ark
• William Casarin
• zealsham
• Zero-1729

As well as to everyone that helped with translations on Transifex.