Bitcoin Core

This is a minor bugfix release.

This release introduces a new network rule: “a block is not valid if it contains a transaction whose hash already exists in the block chain, unless all that transaction’s outputs were already spent before said block” beginning on March 15, 2012, 00:00 UTC. It adds various bug and security fixes, UPnp improvements, and a new checkpoint at block 168,000.

This release checks all transactions in blocks after the last checkpoint. It ceases locking memory used by non-sensitive information. It fixes some address-handling deadlocks. It no longer accepts inbound connections over the Internet when Bitcoin is being used with Tor. It re-enables SSL support for the JSON-RPC interface. It uses the correct base transaction fee of 0.0005 BTC for accepting transactions into mined blocks. It doesn’t show “IP” for transactions that are not necessarily IP transactions. It adds new DNS seeds.

SSL support was re-enabled for the JSON-RPC interface (it had been unintentionally disabled in the 0.5.0 release binaries). The code that finds peers via “DNS seeds” no longer stops bitcoin startup if one of the DNS seed machines is down. Tooltips on the transaction list view now render correctly. A denial-of-service attack involving flooding a bitcoin node with orphan blocks was fixed. The wallet passphrase dialog now warns you if the caps lock key was pressed. Searching in addresses and labels was improved in bitcoin-qt. Five new translations were provided.

This release fixes the broken wallet.dat encryption implementation in 0.4.0 (read the bitcoin website for details), adds a new Qt-based graphical interface, adds the new RPC commands getmemorypool, listsinceblock, signmessage, and verifymessage, and performs faster initial block downloading.