Bitcoin Core version 0.16.2 is now available for download. All users are encouraged to upgrade to this maintenance release that fixes several bugs and provides backports of new minor features, such as:

  • The verifytxoutproof RPC is no longer vulnerable to a particular expensive attack against SPV proofs publicly disclosed in early June. The attack was considered unlikely given that much cheaper attacks of roughly equal effectiveness are well known. Similarly, the getblock RPC also now returns extra information that can be used to defeat this attack even if the requested block has been pruned. None of this mitigates the attack for actual SPV clients.

  • The abandontransaction RPC has been fixed to abandon all descendant transactions, not just children. As before, you can call this RPC when you no longer want your wallet to re-broadcast an old unconfirmed transaction. Note that the RPC can not force miners or other nodes to forget about the transaction.

For a complete list of changes, please see the release notes. If have any questions, please stop by our IRC chatroom and we’ll do our best to help you.