Bitcoin Core 0.13.0, the thirteenth generation of Bitcoin’s reference client as first launched by Satoshi Nakamoto almost eight years ago, has now been tagged for release. This is one of the final steps in the software release process and initiates the Gitian build process . Bitcoin Core 0.13.0 was developed by some 100 contributors over a period of about five months. And while much of the development effort over this time has also been focused on Segregated Witness, which will be activated only in a future minor release of the software, Bitcoin Core 0.13.0 includes about a dozen notable improvements compared to Bitcoin Core 0.12.0. These are the most important changes. Child Pays for Parent The number of transactions on the Bitcoin network has been steadily growing over time. As a result, more blocks have been filling up, and miners typically charge higher fees to include transactions into blocks. Transactions that don’t include sufficient fees usually take longer to confirm, or perhaps even never confirm at all. This has proved to be somewhat problematic, especially in periods where so-called “stress tests” were conducted on the network, with spikes in the total number of transactions on the network and substantial transaction delays. Individual users can solve this problem by including a higher fee in their transactions, incentivizing miners to prioritize these transactions. This is possible even after a transaction is sent, using Opt-in Replace-by-Fee (RBF); however, not many wallets include this option yet. Additionally, RBF is only an option for the sender of a transaction. Up till now, the receiver had no way to bump the fee for an incoming transaction to speed up confirmation. This problem is effectively solved with a trick called “Child Pays for Parent” (CPFP). CPFP is a policy used by miners to select which transactions […]
