Bitcoin Core 0.13.2 Release: Graceful Recovery

The Bitcoin Core development team released Bitcoin Core 0.13.2 on January 3. As a minor release, the latest version of the Bitcoin Core software features bug fixes and performance improvements.

The most notable update is a change to wallet handling of mempool rejection. This enables more graceful recovery from specific edge cases where transactions depend on other unconfirmed transactions. In other words, it prevents transactions from getting stuck in the wallet and ensures that the Bitcoin Core software doesn’t need to be restarted to fix the issue.

To be specific, Bitcoin Core developer and Ciphrex CEO Eric Lombrozo explained during an interview with Bitcoin Magazine that the “sendtoaddress” and “sendmany” RPC calls merge several operations, which may make proper error handling difficult.

“In the Ciphrex application development stack, we use multiple calls to send transactions: Create, Sign, Send. Bitcoin Core also does this for the lower-level raw transaction processing calls,” Lombrozo told Bitcoin Magazine.

“I still think the send RPC calls combine too many operations into a single call, which makes it hard to do proper error handling as an application developer. But this change at least allows for more graceful recovery from a specific edge case,” Lombrozo added.

Adoption Rate and SegWit

For normal, everyday users, the change from Bitcoin Core 0.13.1 will probably not be a big one. Like Bitcoin Core 0.13.1, Bitcoin Core 0.13.2 includes code for the Segregated Witness soft fork — but activation of course depends on miners. Users are not required to upgrade to Bitcoin Core 0.13.2 in order to remain part of the Bitcoin network, though it is advised.

Within a week since the release of Bitcoin Core 0.13.2, over 12 percent of reachable Bitcoin nodes as stated by Bitnodes have already upgraded to the new release.

The release of 0.13.2 also marks the first minor upgrade of the Bitcoin software in 2017. Bitcoin experts, including Andreas Antonopoulos and Bitcoin Core developer Jonas Schnelli, unanimously agreed that 2016 was an important year in Bitcoin development and innovation.

Schnelli revealed that 517 Github contributors played an active role in the development of Bitcoin, and nearly 4.5 commits were made on a daily basis throughout the year. Beginning with the new Bitcoin Core release, Bitcoin users and enthusiasts hope to see yet another active year of development in 2017.