3.1 KiB
(note: this is a temporary file, to be added-to by anybody, and moved to release-notes at release time)
Transaction fee changes
This release automatically estimates how high a transaction fee (or how high a priority) transactions require to be confirmed quickly. The default settings will create transactions that confirm quickly; see the new 'txconfirmtarget' setting to control the tradeoff between fees and confirmation times.
Prior releases used hard-coded fees (and priorities), and would sometimes create transactions that took a very long time to confirm.
New Command Line Options
-txconfirmtarget=n : create transactions that have enough fees (or priority) so they are likely to confirm within n blocks (default: 1). This setting is over-ridden by the -paytxfee option.
New RPC methods
Fee/Priority estimation
estimatefee nblocks : Returns approximate fee-per-1,000-bytes needed for a transaction to be confirmed within nblocks. Returns -1 if not enough transactions have been observed to compute a good estimate.
estimatepriority nblocks : Returns approximate priority needed for a zero-fee transaction to confirm within nblocks. Returns -1 if not enough free transactions have been observed to compute a good estimate.
Statistics used to estimate fees and priorities are saved in the data directory in the 'fee_estimates.dat' file just before program shutdown, and are read in at startup.
Double-Spend Relay and Alerts
VERY IMPORTANT: It has never been safe, and remains unsafe, to rely on unconfirmed transactions.
Relay
When an attempt is seen on the network to spend the same unspent funds more than once, it is no longer ignored. Instead, it is broadcast, to serve as an alert. This broadcast is subject to protections against denial-of-service attacks.
Wallets and other bitcoin services should alert their users to double-spends that affect them. Merchants and other users may have enough time to withhold goods or services when payment becomes uncertain, until confirmation.
Bitcoin Core Wallet Alerts
The Bitcoin Core wallet now makes respend attempts visible in several ways.
If you are online, and a respend affecting one of your wallet
transactions is seen, a notification is immediately issued to the
command registered with -respendnotify=<cmd>. Additionally, if
using the GUI:
- An alert box is immediately displayed.
- The affected wallet transaction is highlighted in red until it is confirmed (and it may never be confirmed).
A respendsobserved array is added to gettransaction, listtransactions,
and listsinceblock RPC results.
Warning
If you rely on an unconfirmed transaction, these change do VERY LITTLE to protect you from a malicious double-spend, because:
- You may learn about the respend too late to avoid doing whatever you were being paid for
- Using other relay rules, a double-spender can craft his crime to resist broadcast
- Miners can choose which conflicting spend to confirm, and some miners may not confirm the first acceptable spend they see