0.20.1 Release Notes

Bitcoin Core version 0.20.1 is now available from:

https://bitcoincore.org/bin/bitcoin-core-0.20.1/

This minor release includes various bug fixes and performance improvements, as well as updated translations.

Please report bugs using the issue tracker at GitHub:

https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/issues

To receive security and update notifications, please subscribe to:

https://bitcoincore.org/en/list/announcements/join/

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 in some cases), then run the installer (on Windows) or just copy over /Applications/Bitcoin-Qt (on Mac) or bitcoind/bitcoin-qt (on Linux).

Upgrading directly from a version of Bitcoin Core that has reached its EOL is possible, but it might take some time if the data directory needs to be migrated. Old wallet versions of Bitcoin Core are generally supported.

Compatibility

Bitcoin Core is supported and extensively tested on operating systems using the Linux kernel, macOS 10.12+, and Windows 7 and newer. Bitcoin Core should also work on most other Unix-like systems but is not as frequently tested on them. It is not recommended to use Bitcoin Core on unsupported systems.

From Bitcoin Core 0.20.0 onwards, macOS versions earlier than 10.12 are no longer supported. Additionally, Bitcoin Core does not yet change appearance when macOS “dark mode” is activated.

Known Bugs

The process for generating the source code release (“tarball”) has changed in an effort to make it more complete, however, there are a few regressions in this release:

  • The generated configure script is currently missing, and you will need to install autotools and run ./autogen.sh before you can run ./configure. This is the same as when checking out from git.

  • Instead of running make simply, you should instead run BITCOIN_GENBUILD_NO_GIT=1 make.

Notable changes

Changes regarding misbehaving peers

Peers that misbehave (e.g. send us invalid blocks) are now referred to as discouraged nodes in log output, as they’re not (and weren’t) strictly banned: incoming connections are still allowed from them, but they’re preferred for eviction.

Furthermore, a few additional changes are introduced to how discouraged addresses are treated:

  • Discouraging an address does not time out automatically after 24 hours (or the -bantime setting). Depending on traffic from other peers, discouragement may time out at an indeterminate time.

  • Discouragement is not persisted over restarts.

  • There is no method to list discouraged addresses. They are not returned by the listbanned RPC. That RPC also no longer reports the ban_reason field, as "manually added" is the only remaining option.

  • Discouragement cannot be removed with the setban remove RPC command. If you need to remove a discouragement, you can remove all discouragements by stop-starting your node.

Notification changes

-walletnotify notifications are now sent for wallet transactions that are removed from the mempool because they conflict with a new block. These notifications were sent previously before the v0.19 release, but had been broken since that release (bug #18325)

PSBT changes

PSBTs will contain both the non-witness utxo and the witness utxo for segwit inputs in order to restore compatibility with wallet software that are now requiring the full previous transaction for segwit inputs. The witness utxo is still provided to maintain compatibility with software which relied on its existence to determine whether an input was segwit.

0.20.1 change log

Mining

  • #19019 Fix GBT: Restore “!segwit” and “csv” to “rules” key (luke-jr)

P2P protocol and network code

  • #19219 Replace automatic bans with discouragement filter (sipa)

Wallet

  • #19300 Handle concurrent wallet loading (promag)
  • #18982 Minimal fix to restore conflicted transaction notifications (ryanofsky)

RPC and other APIs

  • #19524 Increment input value sum only once per UTXO in decodepsbt (fanquake)
  • #19517 psbt: Increment input value sum only once per UTXO in decodepsbt (achow101)
  • #19215 psbt: Include and allow both non_witness_utxo and witness_utxo for segwit inputs (achow101)

GUI

  • #19097 Add missing QPainterPath include (achow101)
  • #19059 update Qt base translations for macOS release (fanquake)

Build system

  • #19152 improve build OS configure output (skmcontrib)
  • #19536 qt, build: Fix QFileDialog for static builds (hebasto)

Tests and QA

  • #19444 Remove cached directories and associated script blocks from appveyor config (sipsorcery)
  • #18640 appveyor: Remove clcache (MarcoFalke)

Miscellaneous

  • #19194 util: Don’t reference errno when pthread fails (miztake)
  • #18700 Fix locking on WSL using flock instead of fcntl (meshcollider)

Credits

Thanks to everyone who directly contributed to this release:

  • Aaron Clauson
  • Andrew Chow
  • fanquake
  • Hennadii Stepanov
  • João Barbosa
  • Luke Dashjr
  • MarcoFalke
  • MIZUTA Takeshi
  • Pieter Wuille
  • Russell Yanofsky
  • sachinkm77
  • Samuel Dobson
  • Wladimir J. van der Laan

As well as to everyone that helped with translations on Transifex.