The Bitcoin Foundation announced Wednesday that a number of updates had been made to Bitcoin Core and that v. 0.9.0 was now available.
This is a major release, with a number of bug fixes. Among the updates:
- A UX overhaul of the payment requests process
- Rebranding: The Bitcoin reference client v. 0.9.0 is now known as Bitcoin Core because certain extra functionality will be spun off into independent projects in later releases
- A more convenient workflow when you receive coins
- Manual coin control
We spoke with Core developer Mike Hearn about the latest update.
Cointelegraph: Transaction malleability issues were fixed in this update. You've said the work is not over yet; can we expect a new update soon? Can you give some additional details?
Mike Hearn: Most of the changes in 0.9 are actually just to let users of the Core wallet recover from mutated transactions. It does not actually address the underlying issues. There is consensus on a plan for an upgrade to Bitcoin that will let wallets "opt out" of all the malleability points we know about (for backwards compatibility and other reasons they cannot just be banned entirely). However as far as I know, nobody is working on it at the moment.
CT: Floating fees. Can you give any prognoses as to how their implementation might affect the market?
MH: We don't know yet how it will affect the market. Rolling it out will take time and probably be quite tricky. Ideally, we don't want fees to go up instead of down, for example. I guess the rollout would be in stages with estimated fees being calculated but not used for a while. Then if it seems to be behaving OK we'd start adding features to wallets to let users pick how quickly they want a transaction to confirm. It needs a lot more design and coding work to be fully finished unfortunately.