The Bitcoin Core client software got its latest update Thursday. News of the update has been overshadowed by price drops due to uncertainty over China’s policy toward crypto exchanges and ICOs. While traders wait for that news to shake out, today’s update offers some significant improvements to the Core client that solidify bitcoin’s fundamentals.

New Data Structure Lowers Resource Load

The biggest change to the new client software is a new data structure that switches from a per-transaction storage to a per-output storage. While this uses some more disk space, it results in some other significant performance improvements:

improved memory usage

improved cache memory allocation

reduced CPU usage

simpler code

up to 40% faster starts for new full nodes

Improved Fee Handling

The new Bitcoin Core client offers better estimates of the fees necessary for a particular transaction to process in a reasonable time period. The new fee estimate settings allow users to choose between “conservative” or “economical” settings. Those names seem to invite confusion, but “conservative” is aimed at saving time while “economical” is aimed at saving money.

GUI users can now update their attached fees even after the transaction has been sent. This feature has been available through the command line for some time and is already supported by most miners. Now it is available to GUI users as well.

When users create an opt-in “replace-by-fee” transaction, they can later choose to modify it with a higher fee after the transaction is sent. Miners who support RBF transactions (most do) can then pick up the modified fee transaction for quicker processing.

Multiple Wallets in One Client

Another feature that has been added to the Core client is the ability to hold multiple wallets at one time. This allows users to more easily split up amounts for different purposes, such as separating business and personal funds. While handling funds separately was always possible by utilizing “coin control” to manage which addresses get spent, generating multiple wallets simplifies the process.

Other features added in this latest update include the removal of coin age priority, the addition of mempool persistence, and a host of other small changes. The full list of version changes can be found on the official Bitcoin website.

Over 100 individual developers contributed to coding this update, along with substantial contributions from organizations including Blockstream, Chaincode, and MIT. If you would like to help with development, you will find links to the GitHub and other resources here.

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