Bitcoin-Qt version 0.7.0 released
17 September 2012

Bitcoin-Qt version 0.7.0 is now available for download at: https://sourceforge.net/projects/bitcoin/files/Bitcoin/bitcoin-0.7.0/

We recommend that everybody running prior versions of bitcoind/Bitcoin-Qt upgrade to this release, except for users running Mac OSX 10.5.

Please report bugs using the issue tracker at GitHub.

Project source code is hosted at github; you can get source-only tarballs/zipballs directly from there: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/tarball/v0.7.0 # .tar.gz https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/zipball/v0.7.0 # .zip

Ubuntu Linux users can use the “Personal Package Archive” (PPA) maintained by Matt Corallo to automatically keep bitcoin up-to-date. Just type sudo apt-add-repository ppa:bitcoin/bitcoin sudo apt-get update in your terminal, then install the bitcoin-qt package: sudo apt-get install bitcoin-qt

How to Upgrade

If you are running an older version, shut it down. Wait until it has completely shut down (which might take a few minutes for older versions), then run the installer (on Windows) or just copy over /Applications/Bitcoin-Qt (on Mac) or bitcoind/bitcoin-qt (on Linux).

If you were running on Linux with a version that might have been compiled with a different version of Berkeley DB (for example, if you were using the PPA and are switching to the binary release), then run the old version again with the -detachdb argument and shut it down; if you do not, then the new version will not be able to read the database files and will exit with an error.

Incompatible Changes

• Replaced the getmemorypool RPC command with getblocktemplate/submitblock and getrawmempool commands.
• Remove deprecated RPC getblocknumber

Bitcoin Improvement Proposals implemented

BIP 22 - getblocktemplate, submitblock RPCs BIP 34 - block version 2, height in coinbase BIP 35 - mempool message, extended getdata message behavior

Core bitcoin handling and blockchain database

• Reduced CPU usage, by eliminating some redundant hash calculations
• Cache signature verifications, to eliminate redundant signature checks
• Transactions with zero-value outputs are considered non-standard
• Mining: when creating new blocks, sort ‘paid’ area by fee-per-kb
• Database: better validation of on-disk stored data
• Database: minor optimizations and reliability improvements
• -loadblock=FILE will import an external block file
• Additional DoS (denial-of-service) prevention measures
• New blockchain checkpoint at block 193,000

JSON-RPC API

• Internal HTTP server is now thread-per-connection, rather than a single-threaded queue that would stall on network I/O.
• Internal HTTP server supports HTTP/1.1, pipelined requests and connection keep-alive.
• Support JSON-RPC 2.0 batches, to encapsulate multiple JSON-RPC requests within a single HTTP request.
• IPv6 support
• Added raw transaction API. See https://gist.github.com/2839617
• Added getrawmempool, to list contents of TX memory pool
• Added getpeerinfo, to list data about each connected network peer
• Added listaddressgroupings for better coin control
• Rework getblock call.
• Remove deprecated RPC getblocknumber
• Remove superceded RPC getmemorypool (see BIP 22, above)
• listtransactions output now displays “smart” times for transactions, and blocktime and timereceived fields were added

P2P networking

• IPv6 support
• Tor hidden service support (see doc/Tor.txt)
• Attempts to fix “stuck blockchain download” problems
• Replace BDB database “addr.dat” with internally-managed “peers.dat” file containing peer address data.
• Lower default send buffer from 10MB to 1MB
• proxy: SOCKS5 by default
• Support connecting by hostnames passed to proxy
• Add -seednode connections, and use this instead of DNS seeds when proxied
• Added -externalip and -discover
• Add -onlynet to connect only to a given network (IPv4, IPv6, or Tor)
• Separate listening sockets, -bind=<addr>

Qt GUI

• Add UI RPC console / debug window
• Re-Enable URI handling on Windows, add safety checks and tray-notifications
• Harmonize the use of ellipsis (“…”) to be used in menus, but not on buttons
• Add 2 labels to the overviewpage that display Wallet and Transaction status (obsolete or current)
• Extend the optionsdialog (e.g. language selection) and re-work it to a tabbed UI
• Merge sign/verify message into a single window with tabbed UI
• Ensure a changed bitcoin unit immediately updates all GUI elements that use units
• Update QR Code dialog
• Improve error reporting at startup
• Fine-grained UI updates for a much smoother UI during block downloads
• Remove autocorrection of 0/i in addresses in UI
• Reorganize tray icon menu into more logical order
• Persistently poll for balance change when number of blocks changed
• Much better translations
• Override progress bar design on platforms with segmented progress bars to assist with readability
• Added ‘immature balance’ display on the overview page
• (Windows only): enable ASLR and DEP for bitcoin-qt.exe
• (Windows only): add meta-data to bitcoin-qt.exe (e.g. description)

Internal codebase

• Additional unit tests
• Compile warning fixes

Miscellaneous

• Reopen debug.log upon SIGHUP
• Bash programmable completion for bitcoind(1)
• On supported OS’s, each thread is given a useful name