Bitcoin Core 0.19.0 Released

Yesterday marked the official release of Bitcoin Core 0.19.0, the 19th major release of Bitcoin’s original software client and still the most dominant Bitcoin implementation on the network today. The release includes a range of performance improvements, modernizations and bug fixes. The addition of Bech32 addresses as a default in the Bitcoin Core wallet GUI provides a number of benefits. It reduces the potential for human mistakes (typos) by using fewer characters and eliminating the distinction between lowercase and capital letters in addresses, and it reduces the cost to send SegWit transactions by reducing the data required to be included in each transaction (relative to a P2SH output). In an effort to make “partitioning attacks” harder to execute, the release also increases the default for outgoing connections for relaying blocks by two. The addition defaults nodes into establishing more connections to one another while only increasing bandwidth requirements minimally. Other notably changes included in the release include the removal of Bloom Filter requests by default, additionally support for compact client-side block filtering, and the removal of payment protocol support from the GUI.

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According to Coin Dance ~4% of the 9332 public nodes running on the Bitcoin network have adopted the update.

Why it matters:

• The release illustrates well Bitcoin Core’s approach to protocol development. Bitcoin Core upgrades the Bitcoin protocol through soft forks. The release was developed over the course of 6 months with hundreds of contributors playing a role and provides a number of performance improvements and bug fixes without breaking compatibility with prior Bitcoin Core implementations.
• Due to the backward compatibility inherent in soft forks, it is not imperative that nodes upgrade immediately reducing the amount of coordination needed for protocol upgrades dramatically. Running the new software is completely voluntary, hence the minimal support of the upgrade so far.
  

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