As the November 15th hardfork upgrade approaches and proposals continue to be discussed, the Bitcoin ABC team would like to set a timeline to ensure a smooth upgrade in November. Using our learnings from the previous fork in May, we want to make sure people are aware of these dates in advance, and more importantly, that the community help us encourage everyone to stick to them.
August 15th: Code complete
Due to the higher-than-normal risk associated with protocol upgrades, everyone needs time to review the code changes involved. To accommodate that, Bitcoin ABC is targeting August 15th as its code completion date. Protocol changes past this date will be recommended for next year’s May hardfork.
As of this writing, that code complete date is a little over 5 weeks away. Given that all protocol changes must come with an associated spec, tests, and time to review both of those, we highly encourage all Bitcoin Cash developers to have their protocol specs near completion in the next couple weeks, especially for more complex changes.
Once the code complete deadline is hit, testing on testnet will begin.
October 15th: Testnet deadline & official release
Barring the discovery of any major issues after two months of testnet testing and debugging, Bitcoin ABC will launch the official release for version 0.18. This will give node operators approximately 30 days to upgrade in time for the hardfork.