Episode 56: Bitcoin Core 23.0

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. Chapters 00:00:00 Introduction and listener topic requests 00:02:07 Bitcoin Core 23.0 and release candidate testing 00:04:26 Connecting to peers beyond port 8333 00:10:47 CJDNS network support 00:12:41 Fee estimation and replace-by-fee transactions 00:17:28 USDT tracepoints for node monitoring 00:22:05 Finding typos in Bech32 addresses 00:24:23 Taproot wallet support 00:26:41 Persistent coin freezing and privacy 00:29:37 Fixing a Windows compiler bug