btcd v0.12.0-beta

Protocol and network related changes:

• Add a new checkpoint at block height 382320 (#555)
• Implement BIP0065 which includes support for version 4 blocks, a new consensus opcode (OP_CHECKLOCKTIMEVERIFY) that enforces transaction lock times, and a double-threshold switchover mechanism (#535, #459, #455)
• Implement BIP0111 which provides a new bloom filter service flag and hence provides support for protocol version 70011 (#499)
• Add a new parameter --nopeerbloomfilters to allow disabling bloom filter support (#499)
• Reject non-canonically encoded variable length integers (#507)
• Add mainnet peer discovery DNS seed (seed.bitcoin.jonasschnelli.ch) (#496)
• Correct reconnect handling for persistent peers (#463, #464)
• Ignore requests for block headers if not fully synced (#444)
• Add CLI support for specifying the zone id on IPv6 addresses (#538)
• Fix a couple of issue where the initial block sync could stall (#518, #229, #486)
• Fix an issue which prevented the --onion option from working as intended (#446)

Transaction relay (memory pool) changes:

• Require transactions to only include signatures encoded with the canonical 'low-s' encoding (#512)
• Add a new parameter --minrelaytxfee to allow the minimum transaction fee in BTC/kB to be overridden (#520)
• Retain memory pool transactions when they redeem another one that is removed when a block is accepted (#539)
• Do not send reject messages for a transaction if it is valid but causes an orphan transaction which depends on it to be determined as invalid (#546)
• Refrain from attempting to add orphans to the memory pool multiple times when the transaction they redeem is added (#551)
• Modify minimum transaction fee calculations to scale based on bytes instead of full kilobyte boundaries (#521, #537)

Implement signature cache:

• Provides a limited memory cache of validated signatures which is a huge optimization when verifying blocks for transactions that are already in the memory pool (#506)
• Add a new parameter --sigcachemaxsize which allows the size of the new cache to be manually changed if desired (#506)

Mining support changes:

• Notify getblocktemplate long polling clients when a block is pushed via submitblock (#488)
• Speed up getblocktemplate by making use of the new signature cache (#506)

RPC changes:

• Implement getmempoolinfo command (#453)
• Implement getblockheader command (#461)
• Modify createrawtransaction command to accept a new optional parameter locktime (#529)
• Modify listunspent result to include the spendable field (#440)
• Modify getinfo command to include errors field (#511)
• Add timestamps to blockconnected and blockdisconnected notifications (#450)
• Several modifications to searchrawtranscations:
  • Accept a new optional parameter vinextra which causes the results to include information about the outputs referenced by a transaction inputs (#485, #487)
  • Skip entries in the mempool too (#495)
  • Accept a new optional parameter reverse to return the results in reverse order (most recent to oldest) (#497)
  • Accept a new optional parameter filteraddrs which causes the results to only include inputs and outputs which involve the provided addresses (#516)
• Change the notification order to notify clients about mined transactions (recvtx, redeemingtx) before the blockconnected notification (#449)
• Update verifymessage RPC to use the standard algorithm so it is compatible with other implementations (#515)
• Improve ping statistics by pinging on an interval (#517)

Websocket changes:

• Implement session command which returns a per-session unique id (#500, #503)

btcctl utility changes:

• Add getmempoolinfo command (#453)
• Add getblockheader command (#461)
• Add getwalletinfo command (#471)

Notable developer-related package changes:

• Introduce a new peer package which acts a common base for creating and concurrently managing bitcoin network peers (#445)
  • Various cleanup of the new peer package (#528, #531, #524, #534, #549)
• Blocks heights now consistently use int32 everywhere (#481)
• The BlockHeader type in the wire package now provides the BtcDecode and BtcEncode methods (#467)
• Update wire package to recognize BIP0064 (getutxo) service bit (#489)
• Export LockTimeThreshold constant from txscript package (#454)
• Export MaxDataCarrierSize constant from txscript package (#466)
• Provide new IsUnspendable function from the txscript package (#478)
• Export variable length string functions from the wire package (#514)
• Export DNS Seeds for each network from the chaincfg package (#544)
• Preliminary work towards separating the memory pool into a separate package (#525, #548)

Misc changes:

• Various documentation updates (#442, #462, #465, #460, #470, #473, #505, #530, #545)
• Add installation instructions for gentoo (#542)
• Ensure an error is shown if OS limits can't be set at startup (#498)
• Tighten the standardness checks for multisig scripts (#526)
• Test coverage improvement (#468, #494, #527, #543, #550)
• Several optimizations (#457, #474, #475, #476, #508, #509)
• Minor code cleanup and refactoring (#472, #479, #482, #519, #540)

Contributors (alphabetical order):

• Ben Echols
• Bruno Clermont
• danda
• Daniel Krawisz
• Dario Nieuwenhuis
• Dave Collins
• David Hill
• Javed Khan
• Jonathan Gillham
• Joseph Becher
• Josh Rickmar
• Justus Ranvier
• Mawuli Adzoe
• Olaoluwa Osuntokun
• Rune T. Aune

MSI Checksums:

SHA256(btcd_standalone_0.12.0-beta_x64.msi)= 024274804600e0a37ba5e7ac5abc9fdfe91b071e92c9251f38f01bec6785fb77
SHA256(btcd_standalone_0.12.0-beta_x86.msi)= b122bb7cd29e0e5e32ada279a12eeef3d44d58f3bb377ea7ce8b1f42ca0bdba3
SHA512(btcd_standalone_0.12.0-beta_x64.msi)= 725266286cb5ba62d435b992353b83aef4a3586e5ee9aeecfcc90b8026225f12c081471d56fb0f02d92ca5d92965eb99429209125b108c47599c8b1b619fb852
SHA512(btcd_standalone_0.12.0-beta_x86.msi)= d2849eef7cce9ec88a9538940c3ebfb08c2ecbf4be88f4029552bac5db2cdc203e31e8a401cf54dab694d4f49dd640bc8bb962cb5d70227bde91d785364823cb