Bitcoin ABC 0.21.5 Release Notes

Bitcoin ABC version 0.21.5 is now available from:

This release includes the following features and fixes:

Removed deprecated getinfo RPC.
Update univalue to 1.0.5
The Official Ubuntu PPA will no longer update the package for the 16.04 Xenial version. The most recent versions can still be downloaded from bitcoinabc.org. The PPA is now offering a package for 20.04 Focal.
Minor performance improvements for JSON RPC calls that fetch headers or blocks.
Various minor bug fixes.

Tests

The regression test chain, that can be enabled by the -regtest command line flag, now requires transactions to not violate standard policy by default. Making the default the same as mainnet makes it easier to test mainnet behavior on regtest. Be reminded that the testnet still allows non-standard txs by default and that the policy can be locally adjusted with the -acceptnonstdtxn command line flag for both test chains.

An error is issued where previously a warning was issued when a setting in the config file was specified in the default section, but not overridden for the selected network. This change takes only effect if the selected network is not mainnet.
The echo RPC will now return an internal bug report if exactly 100 arguments are provided.

A new bitcoin-wallet tool is now available, distributed alongside our usual binaries. This tool provides a way to create new wallet files and inspect basic information about a wallet without using any RPCs.

The wallet’s generate RPC method has been deprecated and will be fully removed in v0.22.
generate is only used for testing. The RPC call reaches across multiple subsystems (wallet and mining), so is deprecated to simplify the wallet-node interface. Projects that are using generate for testing purposes should transition to using the generatetoaddress call, which does not require or use the wallet component. Calling generatetoaddress with an address returned by getnewaddress gives the same functionality as the old generate method.
To continue using generate in v0.21, restart bitcoind with the -deprecatedrpc=generate configuration.