Bitcoin Optech, in its 21st August weekly newsletter, anticipates Bitcoin Core‘s next update, 0.17, giving some indication on the topics followed by BTC developers.
The integration of the upgrades will take place in the next days with the addition of the various release candidates in version v0.17.
The update is in the final test phase, “release candidate 2”, so within a few days we can expect the final release of the software.
The newsletter also contains information on five projects discussed in the last meeting of developers who contribute to the open source project Bitcoin Core, giving information on which updates will be integrated into future versions of the software.
The most relevant of these are:
- the possibility of integrating a more advanced P2P encoding, because the current identity verification is linked to a reduced level of privacy and the developer Jonas Schnelli is working on an improved version;
- improvements in Output Script descriptions, so that wallets no longer have to import them completely, but can access only a list of these descriptions completed by metadata. This would lighten the data exchanged and make it easier to integrate Bitcoin Core into wallets;
- the integration of RISC-V support to solve some potential problems related to the use of ARM chips;
- a transaction reconciliation protocol that is efficient in terms of the quantity of data transmitted. The current protocol is not efficient, using poorly 90% of the bandwidth of the data transmission;
- a Dandelion protocol resistant to DOS attacks. The Dandelion protocol was developed to make it difficult to identify IPs within a Bitcoin transaction, and Dandelion’s update will allow resistance to Denial of Service attacks.
As of now, the O.17 update released by Bitcoin Core should allow the development of much more stable applications, which in the future will be strengthened by these important updates.
According to the newsletter, the Bitcoin Core, LND and C-Lightning have undergone noticeable commits this week.
Branching of Bitcoin Core 0.17 will allow developers to ensure stability, translation completeness, and other release features on that branch while simultaneously, development of new features will continue on the master branch, the newsletter cited.
