The team behind Bitcoin Core development have released their newest update on November 24th to Bitcoin (BTC)’s original software client. Bitcoin Core Software Update Now Uses Segwit Addresses By Default. This is the nineteenth update in Bitcoin’s 11 year history.

Releasing Bitcoin Core 0.19.0 (0.19.0.1 after discovering a last-minute issue in the available download version) was developed by over a hundred contributors over a roughly six month period.

Better SegWit compatibility and new wallet format

Bitcoin Core 0.19.0.1 includes various performance improvements, bug fixes, and updates, resulting from 550 merged pull requests.

The “Bech32” address format is now set as the default option for the first time in the Bitcoin Core wallet Graphical User Interface (GUI), having first been introduced in early 2018 with version 0.16.0.

Bech32 contains a number of improvements, for example no longer distincting between lowercase and capital letters and formatting addresses to begin with “bc1” instead of 1 or 3. This makes the addresses longer than existing format, but uses fewer different characters. The changes are mainly intended to reduce the margin for human error in typos when making transactions.

Bech32 also improves compatibility with SegWit wallets, as transactions now require considerably less data to be transmitted over the Bitcoin network, thereby reducing costs.

