Notes / short topics

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Main topics

0.13.1 release

alert system retirement

0.13.1 release

background

Bitcoin Core 0.13.0 is released on 2016/08/23. The next point release 0.13.1 will probably include the segregated witness softfork activation logic, among other bugfixes and optimizations.

In last weeks meeting developers decided to drop PR #8635 (Enforce mandatory softfork flags for segwit block/tx) from the 0.13.1 milestone tag.

Jl2012 suggests not to do PR #8654 (Reuse sighash computations across evaluation) in 0.13.1. Everyone seems to agree. There is some disagreement on the RPC behavior change in PR #8757 (Fix issue with conflicted mempool tx in listsinceblock). Since people probably built apps on the “strange” behavior it would make more sense to do this in a major release where it’s fully documented in the release notes.

Updates on the remaining pull requests tagged for 0.13.1:

PR #8634 (Add policy: null signature for failed CHECK(MULTI)SIG) has a lot of ACKs and seems ready to merge.

#8499 (Check bad witness and implement several policy limits for segwit scripts) is still being worked on.

#8526 (Make non-minimal OP_IF/NOTIF argument non-standard for P2WSH) needs a few more ACKs.

Sipa will address the latest nits in PR #8393 (Support for compact blocks together with segwit). Roasbeef’s scripts are now running and spamming segwit transactions on testnet, if there are any miners pointing hashpower at testnet, can they set “-blockmaxweight=4000000”, leaving off any other related params so we get more bigger blocks.

Sdaftuar thinks the #8279 issue (Mempool DoS risk in segwit due to malleated transactions) is sufficiently resolved for 0.13.1

Btcd, the alternative bitcoin implementation in Go, will finalize the segwit stuff soon. Petertodds python bitcoin library has a good PR for segwit too. Gmaxwell notes mining software has improved a lot lately on the segwit front. Achow101 notes armory is aiming to have full segwit support the release after the next one.

meeting conclusion

Remove PR #8654 and #8757 from the 0.13.1 milestones, as well as issue #8279

Merge #8634 after squashing the first and last commits

Review/ACK PRs #8393, #8499 and #8526

alert system retirement

background

The bitcoin alert system was a way for trusted parties to broadcast a message to all Core clients about critical network problems. It has been removed in Bitcoin Core since 0.13.0 and has been disabled for a while now.

Earlier this month Gmaxwell posted on the mailinglist the desire to complete the retirement of the alert system, which has been well received.

Gmaxwell proposed these next steps:

Create a bitcoincore.org or bitcoin.org announcement message.

send a penultimate alert with more polite text than the COMPROMISED message that directs people to it.

much later, send final alert.

hardcode nodes to send the final alert to peers to overcome the lack of propagation.

Wumpus proposes to send the final alert with the 0.14 release.

meeting conclusion

Send the final alert with the 0.14 release

Participants

Disclaimer

This summary was compiled without input from any of the participants in the discussion, so any errors are the fault of the summary author and not the discussion participants.