We are pleased to announce the general availability of Bitcoin Core 0.14.1. This release forms part of the regular maintenance cycle of Bitcoin Core and brings bug fixes, optimisations and improvements to the 0.14.x series.

Notable changes

RPC changes

The first positional argument of createrawtransaction was renamed from transactions to inputs .

The argument of disconnectnode was renamed from node to address .

These interface changes break compatibility with 0.14.0, when the named arguments functionality, introduced in 0.14.0, is used. Client software using these calls with named arguments need to be updated.

Mining

In previous versions, the getblocktemplate RPC required segwit support from downstream clients/miners once segwit activated on the network. In this version, it now supports non-segwit clients even after activation by removing all segwit transactions from the returned block template. This allows non-segwit miners to continue functioning correctly even after segwit has activated.

Due to the limitations in previous versions, getblocktemplate also recommended non-segwit clients to not signal for the segwit version-bit. Since this is no longer an issue, getblocktemplate now always recommends signalling segwit for all miners. This is safe because the ability to enforce the rule is the only required criteria for safe activation (actually producing segwit-enabled blocks is not required).

UTXO memory accounting

Memory usage for the UTXO cache is being calculated more accurately, so that the configured limit ( -dbcache ) will be respected when memory usage peaks during cache flushes. The memory accounting in prior releases is estimated to only account for half the actual peak utilization.

The default -dbcache has also been changed in this release to 450MiB. Users who currently set -dbcache to a high value (e.g. to keep the UTXO more fully cached in memory) should consider increasing this setting in order to achieve the same cache performance as prior releases. Users on low-memory systems (such as systems with 1GB or less) should consider specifying a lower value for this parameter.

Additional information relating to running on low-memory systems can be found here: reducing-bitcoind-memory-usage.

Conclusion

For details on all the changes made in Bitcoin Core 0.14.1, please read the release notes. To download, please visit the download page or the files directory.

The next major planned release will be Bitcoin Core 0.15.0. It will begin with a freeze on new feature additions in mid-July and a release when release candidate testing has completed, anticipated to be in early September. For more information, please see the schedule.

If you are interested in contributing to Bitcoin Core, please see our contributing page and the document How to contribute code to Bitcoin Core. If you don’t know where to get started or have any other questions, please stop by our IRC chatroom and we’ll do our best to help you.

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