Bitcoin Unlimited v0.12 "X-Relay" -:- First Official BU Release

[solex]

Announcing BitcoinUnlimited v0.12.0​

Official BU Client Release focused on main-chain scaling, and introducing Extreme Thin Block technology "X-Relay" to Bitcoin, reducing the bandwidth required for nodes to transmit newly mined blocks by an average of 90%. For example 1 MB blocks require only 100KB being transferred.

BitcoinUnlimited v0.12.0 Highlights are:

Core v0.12.0 code-base plus:

Enhancements:

Effective block limit via emergent network consensus

• BUIP001 Fixed block limit made obsolete
• BU follows the blockchain with most PoW as per the original Nakamoto Consensus
• Separation of the mining block size (default 1MB) from the non-mining block acceptance size (default 16MB)
• Block size limits and acceptance depth individually configurable
• Classic block version for mining

Public notification of individual settings

• BUIP005 User agent subversion text contains full node settings
• Miner settings are published in coinbase transaction text

Xtreme Thinblocks

• BUIP010 Reduces real-time block propagation sizes by an average of 90% returning the network overhead for newly mined blocks to the state it was in mid-2012.
  A 98% reduction is possible where a large mempool is available and miners are selecting recent txns.

Xpress Validation

• BUIP010 Superfast block validation leverages the earlier validation of transactions which are in the mempool so that only previously unseen transactions in a block need full validation.

Traffic-shaping

• BUIP001 Users can easily configure how much bandwidth should be used for Bitcoin, allowing the BU client to run unobtrusively in a home network.

Disabled:

Replace-by-Fee [commented out]

• BUIP004 Community vote determines that there is no consensus for a feature which undermines the 0-confirmation use-case

Alert Key [commented out]

• BUIP013 Community vote determines that there is no consensus for privileged access to remain with a few individuals for the sending of unsolicited free-text messages to all BU full nodes.

Acknowledgements with special thanks for coding and testing:
Andrew Stone
bitcartel
Dagurval
hfinger
Peter Tschipper
Sickpig
YarkoL

Download location:
http://www.bitcoinunlimited.info/download
Source code: https://github.com/BitcoinUnlimited/BitcoinUnlimited

 

[VeritasSapere]

Bitcoin Unlimited is the best Bitcoin client presently available. Ahead of its time I still think, which is why Classic stands the greater chance of reaching consensus, fortunately Bitcoin Unlimited is completly compatible with all of the changes within Bitcoin Classic, it is a beautiful thing.

 

[Dusty]

Good work guys.
Do you plan to submit xtream thin blocks and xpress validation enhancements to core?
Even only to know (and document) their reaction to the pull request.

 

[Peter Tschipper]

@Dusty No such plan, at least not from me, too many other things to work on...

 

[pinhead]

I compiled BU 0.12 from source a few weeks ago (March 2). Do I need to upgrade? Or is this all pretty much the same code?

edit: nm, I see I'm behind 49 commits from git, I'll pull and recompile just to be sure

 

[pinhead]

source code link at http://www.bitcoinunlimited.info/download
goes to Andrew Stone's repo, not the official BU github repo. Is that OK?

 

[solex]

@pinhead
Not ok. Good spot. We need to update it to:
https://github.com/BitcoinUnlimited/BitcoinUnlimited

 

[Christoph Bergmann]

I compiled BU 0.12 from source a few weeks ago (March 2). Do I need to upgrade? Or is this all pretty much the same code?

edit: nm, I see I'm behind 49 commits from git, I'll pull and recompile just to be sure

I wanted to ask the same ...

 

[sickpig]

@Christoph Bergmann @pinhead

source = git cloned BU repo?

to be on the safe side:

- clone BU git hub repo,
- git checkout 0.12bu (it should be the default)
- compile the source