Bitcoin ABC 0.22.5 Release Notes

Bitcoin ABC version 0.22.5 is now available from:

https://download.bitcoinabc.org/0.22.5/

This release includes the following features and fixes:

• The -upgradewallet command line flag has been replaced in favor of the upgradewallet RPC.
• Fixed a bug where minimizing to the taskbar would not work properly when the -min option was set on bitcoin-qt.
• Minimum supported Qt version has been bumped to 5.9.5
• Fixed a bug where concurrent calls to the walletpassphrase RPC could deadlock.
• Minor logging improvements.
• Improved performance of verifying elliptic curve signatures.

Updated RPCs

• The getchaintxstats RPC now returns the additional key of window_final_block_height.
• The getnetworkinfo and getpeerinfo commands now contain a new servicesnames field with decoded network service flags.

Updated settings

• The -debug=db logging category, which was deprecated in 0.22.4 and replaced by -debug=walletdb to distinguish it from coindb, has been removed.

• Users setting custom dbcache values can increase their setting slightly without using any more real memory. Recent changes reduced the memory use by about 9% and made chainstate accounting more accurate (it was underestimating the use of memory before). For example, if you set a value of “450” before, you may now set a value of “500” to use about the same real amount of memory. (#16957)

P2P and network changes

Removal of reject network messages from Bitcoin ABC (BIP61)

The command line option to enable BIP61 (-enablebip61) has been removed.

This feature has been disabled by default since Bitcoin ABC version 0.21.9. Nodes on the network can not generally be trusted to send valid (“reject”) messages, so this should only ever be used when connected to a trusted node. Please use the recommended alternatives if you rely on this deprecated feature:

• Testing or debugging of implementations of the Bitcoin P2P network protocol should be done by inspecting the log messages that are produced by a recent version of Bitcoin ABC. Bitcoin ABC logs debug messages (-debug=<category>) to a stream (-printtoconsole) or to a file (-debuglogfile=<debug.log>).

• Testing the validity of a block can be achieved by specific RPCs:
  • submitblock
  • getblocktemplate with 'mode' set to 'proposal' for blocks with potentially invalid POW
• Testing the validity of a transaction can be achieved by specific RPCs:
  • sendrawtransaction
  • testmempoolaccept
• Wallets should not use the absence of “reject” messages to indicate a transaction has propagated the network, nor should wallets use “reject” messages to set transaction fees. Wallets should rather use fee estimation to determine transaction fees and set replace-by-fee if desired. Thus, they could wait until the transaction has confirmed (taking into account the fee target they set (compare the RPC estimatesmartfee)) or listen for the transaction announcement by other network peers to check for propagation.