In this episode of Bitcoin,
Explained, hosts Aaron van Wirdum and Sjors Provoost discuss
Bitcoin Core 23.0, the upcoming major release of Bitcoin's de facto
reference implementation. The duo highlights some of the most
notable changes in this new software client, and they offer a bit
of extra context about the release as well.
At the time of recording this episode, Bitcoin Core 23.0 was still
going through the release candidate phase, where the software is
tested for bugs; Aaron and Sjors start by explaining how this
process works, exactly.
Then, throughout the episode, Aaron and Sjors highlight seven
changes that are included in this new Bitcoin Core release: 1) the
removal of the preference to connect with peers through port 8333,
2) the added support for CJDNS, 3) the inclusion of replace-by-fee
transactions in the transaction fee estimation algorithm, 4) the
inclusion of statically defined tracepoints, 5) a new tool to spot
typos in bech32 addresses, 6) the addition of support for Taproot
in the wallet, and 7) the new option to freeze certain UTXOs until
some time in the future.
Finally, Aaron and Sjors discuss how a bug in a software compiler
had initially resulted in a bug in an earlier version of this
Bitcoin Core release for Windows, giving an interesting insight in
the complications with upstream dependencies.
About the Podcast
Bitcoin Magazine's Technical editor Aaron van Wirdum teams up with Bitcoin core contributor Sjors Provoost to explain Bitcoin one episode at a time.