November hardfork changes to be completed by August 15th Only one week left before the code-complete date

Keeping inline with our proposed November Upgrade Timeline, Bitcoin ABC has been striving to have consensus-related changes be in a code-complete state by August 15th. This is both a reminder to those contributing code to Bitcoin ABC and a status update to the community. Once all changes are in on August 15th, we will be cutting a release for 0.18.0 and begin testing on testnet.

The following changes are completed and will be ready for testing on August 15th:

Canonical transaction ordering [1]

Enforcement of minimum transaction size of 100 bytes to prevent attacks on the Merkle tree [1]

Activation code and implementation for OP_CHECKDATASIG and OP_CHECKDATASIGVERIFY [2]

Make push-only mandatory for scriptSig [1]

The following changes are in progress and we expect them to be ready by August 15th:

Modified fee structure to allow for an order of magnitude decrease in fees for typical transactions (not strictly a consensus change, but an important change being included with the release).

[1] November Hardfork Spec

[2] Spec for OP_CHECKDATASIG and OP_CHECKDATASIGVERIFY