Overview

We are pleased to announce the release of Bitcoin Core 0.15.1.

This release focuses on the safety of the P2P network as a precaution against potential future network forks, as well as bringing bug fixes, optimisations and improvements to the 0.15.x series.

Notable changes

Network fork safety enhancements

A number of changes to the way Bitcoin Core deals with peer connections and invalid blocks have been made, as a safety precaution against blockchain forks and misbehaving peers.

  • Unrequested blocks with less work than the minimum-chain-work are now no longer processed even if they have more work than the tip (a potential issue during IBD where the tip may have low-work). This prevents peers wasting the resources of a node.

  • Peers which provide a chain with less work than the minimum-chain-work during IBD will now be disconnected.

  • For a given outbound peer, we now check whether their best known block has at least as much work as our tip. If it doesn’t, and if we still haven’t heard about a block with sufficient work after a 20 minute timeout, then we send a single getheaders message, and wait 2 more minutes. If after two minutes their best known block has insufficient work, we disconnect that peer. We protect 4 of our outbound peers from being disconnected by this logic to prevent excessive network topology changes as a result of this algorithm, while still ensuring that we have a reasonable number of nodes not known to be on bogus chains.

  • Outbound (non-manual) peers that serve us block headers that are already known to be invalid (other than compact block announcements, because BIP 152 explicitly permits nodes to relay compact blocks before fully validating them) will now be disconnected.

  • If the chain tip has not been advanced for over 30 minutes, we now assume the tip may be stale and will try to connect to an additional outbound peer. A periodic check ensures that if this extra peer connection is in use, we will disconnect the peer that least recently announced a new block.

  • The set of all known invalid-themselves blocks (i.e. blocks which we attempted to connect but which were found to be invalid) are now tracked and used to check if new headers build on an invalid chain. This ensures that everything that descends from an invalid block is marked as such.

RPC changes

  • The currentblocksize value in getmininginfo has been removed.

  • dumpwallet no longer allows overwriting files. This is a security measure as well as prevents dangerous user mistakes.

  • backupwallet will now fail when attempting to backup to source file, rather than destroying the wallet.

  • listsinceblock will now throw an error if an unknown blockhash argument value is passed, instead of returning a list of all wallet transactions since the genesis block. The behaviour is unchanged when an empty string is provided.

Miner block size limiting deprecated

Though blockmaxweight has been preferred for limiting the size of blocks returned by getblocktemplate since 0.13.0, blockmaxsize remained as an option for those who wished to limit their block size directly. Using this option resulted in a few UI issues as well as non-optimal fee selection and ever-so-slightly worse performance, and has thus now been deprecated. Further, the blockmaxsize option is now used only to calculate an implied blockmaxweight, instead of limiting block size directly. Any miners who wish to limit their blocks by size, instead of by weight, will have to do so manually by removing transactions from their block template directly.

GUI settings backed up on reset

The GUI settings will now be written to guisettings.ini.bak in the data directory before wiping them when the -resetguisettings argument is used. This can be used to retroactively troubleshoot issues due to the GUI settings.

Duplicate wallets disallowed

Previously, it was possible to open the same wallet twice by manually copying the wallet file, causing issues when both were opened simultaneously. It is no longer possible to open copies of the same wallet.

Debug -minimumchainwork argument added

A hidden debug argument -minimumchainwork has been added to allow a custom minimum work value to be used when validating a chain.

Conclusion

Please see the release notes for details. To download, please visit the download page.

If have any questions, please stop by our IRC chatroom and we’ll do our best to help you.

Hashes for verification

d64d2e27cad78bbd2a0268bdaa9efa3f1eca670a4fab462b5e851699c780e3a0  bitcoin-0.15.1-aarch64-linux-gnu.tar.gz
ceba092c9a390082ff184c8d82a24bc34d7f9b421dc5c1e6847fcf769541f305  bitcoin-0.15.1-arm-linux-gnueabihf.tar.gz
231e4c9f5cf4ba977dbaf118bf38b0fde4d50ab7b9efd65bee6647fb14035a2c  bitcoin-0.15.1-i686-pc-linux-gnu.tar.gz
b6771c5d67fb6b9c4882cc351e579470a008211d76407155e544b28b00fcd711  bitcoin-0.15.1-osx64.tar.gz
0ce5ca1ba424603526d8a40d9321f1f735797a7205a7fbbe39561c078f2a0858  bitcoin-0.15.1-osx.dmg
34de2dbe058c1f8b6464494468ebe2ff0422614203d292da1c6458d6f87342b4  bitcoin-0.15.1.tar.gz
cc7a31d8fece1462955bddef87945420721e42cfe6af589a36547b0940851765  bitcoin-0.15.1-win32-setup.exe
4d2ad1371df1904367955d3f250212d0edd9f338c26d5cd60d7d8ce3f1733f5a  bitcoin-0.15.1-win32.zip
905a5999fb52b083d7e3bedb2dc6704ca641823f81865db58a55a6a20b454d8c  bitcoin-0.15.1-win64-setup.exe
b858521496c0d7699a6916c20767cdb123eb39be70ffc544d6876b08af3b696a  bitcoin-0.15.1-win64.zip
387c2e12c67250892b0814f26a5a38f837ca8ab68c86af517f975a2a2710225b  bitcoin-0.15.1-x86_64-linux-gnu.tar.gz