Bitcoin 0.12 release

[Jet Cash]

the only thing you cant do with a purned node is help someone else to become a node, but thats not a requirement of a full node IMHO.

I'm running a full node over public WiFi, so I don't have any inbound connections. I suspect that prevents me from helping someone else to become a node.

[shorena]

the only thing you cant do with a purned node is help someone else to become a node, but thats not a requirement of a full node IMHO.

I'm running a full node over public WiFi, so I don't have any inbound connections. I suspect that prevents me from helping someone else to become a node.

Not necessarily, you create 8 outbound connections and one of them might go to a node that accepts inbound connections but is still syncing. As long as your node is not pruned you could help said node to sync up. Im not sure how the chances for that are though.

[Erkallys]

Will the pruneing reduce the 60GB needed atm?

Yes, a pruned Core install takes much less space

How many GB can you save with this feature ? Also, will the pruned nodes still be considered as full nodes ? I'm pretty sure that the asnwer is no, but maybe...

With prune=550, the blocks and chainstate folder use about 2GB in total.

Wow ! That's awesome ! And what about the full node status of the Bitcoin Core wallet ? With such a pruning, I'm sure that it is no longer considered as a full node, but maybe, with some magic...

You still:

# verify all transactions
# verify all blocks
# relay transactions
# relay recent blocks (not old ones though)

the only thing you cant do with a purned node is help someone else to become a node, but thats not a requirement of a full node IMHO.

So this look promising, even if you're node won't be really usefull to the network. Can it still receive and send money ? Now I'm not sure since you don't precised it in the capacibilities of a pruned node.

[theymos]

the only thing you cant do with a purned node is help someone else to become a node, but thats not a requirement of a full node IMHO.

You also can't rescan, which I suspect is what people will end up missing the most with pruning.

[Carlton Banks]

the only thing you cant do with a purned node is help someone else to become a node, but thats not a requirement of a full node IMHO.

So this look promising, even if you're node won't be really usefull to the network. Can it still receive and send money ? Now I'm not sure since you don't precised it in the capacibilities of a pruned node.

0.12 will send and receive money using pruning mode. 0.11.x cannot use the wallet in pruning mode.

[LFC_Bitcoin]

When will the 0.12 stable version be out? I never upgrade when there might be teething problems, bugs etc.

[achow101]

When will the 0.12 stable version be out? I never upgrade when there might be teething problems, bugs etc.

Should be soon. I think it will be out in a week or so. Rc3 was just tagged today and I think it will be the last rc.

[Jet Cash]

I've got a Satoshi.0.12.0 in my peer list right now.

I can't find anywhere to download it though.

[xyzzy099]

I've got a Satoshi.0.12.0 in my peer list right now.

I can't find anywhere to download it though.

The release candidate is here:

https://bitcoin.org/bin/bitcoin-core-0.12.0/test/

[Jet Cash]

Would thast show up as 0.12.0 , or would it have some test suffix like rc3.

[Dabs]

Uh, no -rescan? So, also no -wallet? I have a few different wallets. wallet1.dat, wallet2.dat, wallet3.dat

When I switch wallets, I usually have to shutdown Core, then start it with a -rescan while pointing to the other wallet.

What I could try to do, is make several separate folders or directories of core with each wallet, then prune each one. So for 3 different wallets, I'll be running 3 separate pruned nodes. Could also be separate machines (virtual or real.)

[LFC_Bitcoin]

When will the 0.12 stable version be out? I never upgrade when there might be teething problems, bugs etc.

Should be soon. I think it will be out in a week or so. Rc3 was just tagged today and I think it will be the last rc.

I'll definitely wait until then. Thanks as always bro!

[xyzzy099]

Would thast show up as 0.12.0 , or would it have some test suffix like rc3.

In the peer list, it will show up as 0.12.0.

[theymos]

Uh, no -rescan? So, also no -wallet? I have a few different wallets. wallet1.dat, wallet2.dat, wallet3.dat

When I switch wallets, I usually have to shutdown Core, then start it with a -rescan while pointing to the other wallet.

What I could try to do, is make several separate folders or directories of core with each wallet, then prune each one. So for 3 different wallets, I'll be running 3 separate pruned nodes. Could also be separate machines (virtual or real.)

That'd work, though if I were you I'd just store the whole blockchain. At least on my machines, rescans tend to be a lot quicker than syncing.

In the future Core maybe needs something like:

- You keep the last n levels of ancestor transactions for each UTXO. Electrum servers do this. Then you can almost always rescan, but still save quite a bit of space (though the savings are unpredictable).
- Rescan using only the portion of the block chain that Core is keeping with the prune=<kept chain data in MB>. So if you do prune=20000 or something you'll probably always be able to usefully rescan.
- The ability to rescan by relying on an archival node (maybe one you trust) and bloom filters. Then you can run just one archival node and point your other nodes to it. Note that this is a massive privacy issue if you're relying on random public nodes.

[pedrog]

I've also been running rc1 on Debian without any issue, syncing speed has improved a lot, and wallet now available with pruning mode enable.

Updating to rc2.

Have you tried running in pruned mode yet?  I'm curious how much disk space bitcoin uses with that feature enabled

Yes, -prune enable.

You decide how much space is dedicated to the blockchain.

[omarabid]

Uh, no -rescan? So, also no -wallet? I have a few different wallets. wallet1.dat, wallet2.dat, wallet3.dat

When I switch wallets, I usually have to shutdown Core, then start it with a -rescan while pointing to the other wallet.

What I could try to do, is make several separate folders or directories of core with each wallet, then prune each one. So for 3 different wallets, I'll be running 3 separate pruned nodes. Could also be separate machines (virtual or real.)

That'd work, though if I were you I'd just store the whole blockchain. At least on my machines, rescans tend to be a lot quicker than syncing.

In the future Core maybe needs something like:

- You keep the last n levels of ancestor transactions for each UTXO. Electrum servers do this. Then you can almost always rescan, but still save quite a bit of space (though the savings are unpredictable).
- Rescan using only the portion of the block chain that Core is keeping with the prune=<kept chain data in MB>. So if you do prune=20000 or something you'll probably always be able to usefully rescan.
- The ability to rescan by relying on an archival node (maybe one you trust) and bloom filters. Then you can run just one archival node and point your other nodes to it. Note that this is a massive privacy issue if you're relying on random public nodes.

Shouldn't this problem be solved with an HD wallet? In this case, it should be high on the priorities of core devs. I didn't know many people use bitcoin core as their wallet.

[Carlton Banks]

Uh, no -rescan? So, also no -wallet? I have a few different wallets. wallet1.dat, wallet2.dat, wallet3.dat

When I switch wallets, I usually have to shutdown Core, then start it with a -rescan while pointing to the other wallet.

What I could try to do, is make several separate folders or directories of core with each wallet, then prune each one. So for 3 different wallets, I'll be running 3 separate pruned nodes. Could also be separate machines (virtual or real.)

That'd work, though if I were you I'd just store the whole blockchain. At least on my machines, rescans tend to be a lot quicker than syncing.

In the future Core maybe needs something like:

- You keep the last n levels of ancestor transactions for each UTXO. Electrum servers do this. Then you can almost always rescan, but still save quite a bit of space (though the savings are unpredictable).
- Rescan using only the portion of the block chain that Core is keeping with the prune=<kept chain data in MB>. So if you do prune=20000 or something you'll probably always be able to usefully rescan.
- The ability to rescan by relying on an archival node (maybe one you trust) and bloom filters. Then you can run just one archival node and point your other nodes to it. Note that this is a massive privacy issue if you're relying on random public nodes.

Shouldn't this problem be solved with an HD wallet? In this case, it should be high on the priorities of core devs. I didn't know many people use bitcoin core as their wallet.

No, that's not the purpose of HD wallets (they provide one-time-only wallet backups and/with "master" public keys)

[calkob]

So who is currently developing core considering those who are working on Classic?

[achow101]

So who is currently developing core considering those who are working on Classic?

Everyone who has been working on Core still works on Core. No one jumped from Core to Classic.

If you want names:

• Wladimir J. van der Laan
• Luke-Jr
• Pieter Wuille
• Jorge Timon
• MarcoFalke
• Suhas Daftuar

To name a few.

[mmortal03]

I've been testing out 0.12.0rc3 in pruned mode, and have run into the following error message when restarting Bitcoin Core: "last wallet synchronisation goes beyond pruned data. You need to -reindex (download the whole blockchain again in case of pruned node)"

To reproduce:
0.) Start from scratch, deleting the entire Bitcoin data directory if it exists (leaving no wallet file or blockchain data).
1.) Install Bitcoin Core
2.) Create Bitcoin data directory if it doesn't exist, create bitcoin.conf, set "prune=550" without quotes
3.) Run Bitcoin Core
4.) After you've verified, say, 100,000 blocks, close Bitcoin Core. Wait until the warning window to not shutdown/restart computer completely closes.
5.) Run Bitcoin Core again, let it verify some more, close it again.
6.) Rinse and repeat step 5...

At some point, I get the above error message on starting Bitcoin Core.

I don't know what exactly is causing this, but if you're like me and you've verified a large amount of blocks and then you're told that you have to start completely over, you'll probably be pissed.

This error message is not new, as a related fix for this kind of error, when converting non-pruned nodes to pruned nodes was made here: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/issues/6345

While it's obviously easy to reproduce this error *if* you try plopping an *already existing* wallet.dat file into a pruned node data directory and then running Core -- that's not what I've been experiencing. I've been seeing this error with a brand new wallet.dat that was created from scratch *alongside* a fresh, pruned node.

Edit: If it's a brand new node from scratch, it seems that if you delete the wallet.dat after getting this error, a brand new one will be created, and the blockchain will continue to sync from where it left off, so at least there's that, though, it's still a bug.