The long-awaited baker's dozen Bitcoin Core version has been released, its most anticipated feature being the added soft fork code Segregated Witness, which is to be activated with the next update.

The new version took six months and one dozens of programmers to be created, the announcement says. The total list of BIPs included into the code is 27. Here are the most important ones.

The “child pays for parent” algorithm. With this improvement, receivers of transactions now can speed up the confirmation by offering a higher fee via an attached transaction. In their turn, miners now can prioritise not the highest paying individual transactions, but more profitable sets of transactions, which may pair original low-fee transactions with incentivising high-fee “child” ones added by receivers.

Compact Blocks relay developed by Matt Corallo (who also works for Blockstream) allows to optimise bandwidth usage when sending transaction data over the network. It enables nodes to recognise already received but unconfirmed transactions, and instead of receiving a full new block with confirmed data (and repeated information) they reconstruct the block themselves using only small hashes of transaction data.

Such feature as Hierarchical Deterministic Key Generation allows creating a new pair of public and private keys for each new address, however, basing all these key pairs on a single initial 12-word seed. Customers only need to remember this seed to recover all their keys if needed.

In June, Bitcoin Core developers merged the long-awaited Segregated Witness into Bitcoin Core master repository branch. SegWit is supposed to have two main advantages: it increases the security of transactions and the capacity of the blocks. However, it is included in the current release as a non-active code, while its full implementation is expected with the next Core update 0.13.1.

Bitcoin.org has warned users to be cautious while downloading binaries for the new Bitcoin Core release because of a possible “government-induced” cyberattack. The author of the announcement Cobra-Bitcoin notes that, apart from losing bitcoins, the malware may involve the infected computer into further cyberattacks against the network.

Lyudmila Brus