Bitcoin-Qt / bitcoind version 0.8.0 released

[Gavin Andresen]

Bitcoin-Qt version 0.8.0 is now available from:
  http://sourceforge.net/projects/bitcoin/files/Bitcoin/bitcoin-0.8.0/

This is a major release designed to improve performance and handle the
increasing volume of transactions on the network.

Please report bugs using the issue tracker at github:
  https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/issues

How to Upgrade
--------------

If you are running an older version, shut it down. Wait
until it has completely shut down (which might take a few minutes for older
versions), then run the installer (on Windows) or just copy over
/Applications/Bitcoin-Qt (on Mac) or bitcoind/bitcoin-qt (on Linux).

The first time you run after the upgrade a re-indexing process will be
started that will take anywhere from 30 minutes to several hours,
depending on the speed of your machine.

Incompatible Changes
--------------------

This release no longer maintains a full index of historical transaction ids
by default, so looking up an arbitrary transaction using the getrawtransaction
RPC call will not work. If you need that functionality, you must run once
with -txindex=1 -reindex=1 to rebuild block-chain indices (see below for more
details).

Improvements
------------

Mac and Windows binaries are signed with certificates owned by the Bitcoin
Foundation, to be compatible with the new security features in OSX 10.8 and
Windows 8.

LevelDB, a fast, open-source, non-relational database from Google, is
now used to store transaction and block indices.  LevelDB works much better
on machines with slow I/O and is faster in general. Berkeley DB is now only
used for the wallet.dat file (public and private wallet keys and transactions
relevant to you).

Pieter Wuille implemented many optimizations to the way transactions are
verified, so a running, synchronized node uses less working memory and does
much less I/O. He also implemented parallel signature checking, so if you
have a multi-CPU machine all CPUs will be used to verify transactions.

New Features
------------

"Bloom filter" support in the network protocol for sending only relevant transactions to
lightweight clients.

contrib/verifysfbinaries is a shell-script to verify that the binary downloads
at sourceforge have not been tampered with. If you are able, you can help make
everybody's downloads more secure by running this occasionally to check PGP
signatures against download file checksums.

contrib/spendfrom is a python-language command-line utility that demonstrates
how to use the "raw transactions" JSON-RPC api to send coins received from particular
addresses (also known as "coin control").

New/changed settings (command-line or bitcoin.conf file)
--------------------------------------------------------

dbcache : controls LevelDB memory usage.

par : controls how many threads to use to validate transactions. Defaults to the number
of CPUs on your machine, use -par=1 to limit to a single CPU.

txindex : maintains an extra index of old, spent transaction ids so they will be found
by the getrawtransaction JSON-RPC method.

reindex : rebuild block and transaction indices from the downloaded block data.

New JSON-RPC API Features
-------------------------

lockunspent / listlockunspent allow locking transaction outputs for a period of time so
they will not be spent by other processes that might be accessing the same wallet.

addnode / getaddednodeinfo methods, to connect to specific peers without restarting.

importprivkey now takes an optional boolean parameter (default true) to control whether
or not to rescan the blockchain for transactions after importing a new private key.

Important Bug Fixes
-------------------

Privacy leak: the position of the "change" output in most transactions was not being
properly randomized, making network analysis of the transaction graph to identify
users' wallets easier.

Zero-confirmation transaction vulnerability: accepting zero-confirmation transactions
(transactions that have not yet been included in a block) from somebody you do not
trust is still not recommended, because there will always be ways for attackers to
double-spend zero-confirmation transactions. However, this release includes a bug
fix that makes it a little bit more difficult for attackers to double-spend a
certain type ("lockTime in the future") of zero-confirmation transaction.

Dependency Changes
------------------

Qt 4.8.3 (compiling against older versions of Qt 4 should continue to work)


Thanks to everybody who contributed to this release:
----------------------------------------------------

Alexander Kjeldaas
Andrey Alekseenko
Arnav Singh
Christian von Roques
Eric Lombrozo
Forrest Voight
Gavin Andresen
Gregory Maxwell
Jeff Garzik
Luke Dashjr
Matt Corallo
Mike Cassano
Mike Hearn
Peter Todd
Philip Kaufmann
Pieter Wuille
Richard Schwab
Robert Backhaus
Rune K. Svendsen
Sergio Demian Lerner
Wladimir J. van der Laan
burger2
default
fanquake
grimd34th
justmoon
redshark1802
tucenaber
xanatos

[DutchBrat]

Hi Gavin,

tried installing bitcoin-0.8.0-win32-setup and got the following error msg:

"Error opening file for writing:

C:\Program Files\Bitcoin\bitcoin-qt.exe

Click Abort to stop the installation,
Retry to try again, or
Ignore to skip this file."

Edit: Windows 7-Pro, 32-bit

[Luke-Jr]

tried installing bitcoin-0.8.0-win32-setup and got the following error msg:

"Error opening file for writing:

C:\Program Files\Bitcoin\bitcoin-qt.exe

Click Abort to stop the installation,
Retry to try again, or
Ignore to skip this file."

That means you still have the old version running

[hazek]

Excellent!

A major thank you to all the devs for your continued hard work.

[foo]

Are there any differences from RC1?

[grondilu]

Thanks a lot guys!

Could you give us links to show us the rationale behind the choice of levelDB over BerkeleyDB?  Have you considered other NoSQL databases (MongoDB, Redis,...)?

[Akka]

Finally, thank you guys.

And right on time to the press attention Bitcoin currently receives.

Are there any changes made from the release candidate, or can I just keep it running?

[fimp]

Does 0.8 take up the same amount of disk space as earlier versions?

If no, do I need to manually delete old blockchain files to regain the space?

[foo]

Does 0.8 take up the same amount of disk space as earlier versions?

Yes. Though you can delete blkindex.dat to free up a bit of space.

[ripper234]

Kudos to Gavin & the team for releasing 0.8, an important upgrade to help the network handle the increased load.
Keep up the good work!

If you want to support them, make sure to become members of the Bitcoin Foundation - your contributions go to paying Gavin's salary, and in the future might sponsor additions to the core team (all of which are currently working without pay to my knowledge).

[Scrat Acorns]

Have you considered other NoSQL databases (MongoDB, Redis,...)?

These are full featured databases that require a daemon running in the background. All you need is an embedded KV store.

[WikileaksDude]

Thanks to all involved bitcoin devs on this release!

you guys are my code heroes.

[Gabi]

Yay finally

[Digigami]

Ubuntu/Pinguy 12.04

Replaced the bitcoind/bitcoin-qt with the updated version, launched QT and received an error regarding the database. Sorry, I should have captured the text from the error.. It instructed me to backup the ./bitcoin directory, delete everything except for wallet.dat and run again. I did this, and am now downloading the entire block chain again? On the plus side, it does appear to be processing it much faster then the last time I had to do a full refresh.

Here is what was stored in debug.log if it's of any use. Not sure if this is a bug or if I did something wrong here.

Code:

Bitcoin version v0.8.0-beta (2013-02-18 18:38:34 -0500)
Using OpenSSL version OpenSSL 0.9.8k 25 Mar 2009
Startup time: 2013-02-19 20:00:08
Default data directory /home/jay/.bitcoin
Used data directory /home/jay/.bitcoin
Using 4 threads for script verification
init message: Verifying wallet integrity...
dbenv.open LogDir=/home/jay/.bitcoin/database ErrorFile=/home/jay/.bitcoin/db.l$
ERROR: CDB() : error DB_RUNRECOVERY: Fatal error, run database recovery (-30974$

Edit to add db.log

Code:

Unacceptable log file /home/jay/.bitcoin/database/log.0000014314: unsupported l$
Invalid log file: log.0000014314: Invalid argument
PANIC: Invalid argument
process-private: unable to find environment

[paraipan]

Excellent!

A major thank you to all the devs for your continued hard work.

+1 awesome work people

[Technomage]

Has something changed from RC1?

[Morblias]

Amazing! This loads WAY faster! Took 50 minutes for me compared to the ~8 hours (or whatever it was) it used to take!

8 cores, chugging along getting them blocks  


Thanks devs!

[kuzetsa]

Does 0.8 take up the same amount of disk space as earlier versions?

If no, do I need to manually delete old blockchain files to regain the space?

Note to windows users:

Don't panic... Disk usage might look strange during the upgrade from 0.7.2 to 0.8...

There is a "reindexing" step which does interesting and unspecific technical things (hardlinks and other ... things) to convert to the new blockchain DB format...

Code:

[16:55:30] <kuzetsa> TD: thanks... do you mind if I share this on bitcointalk? (quotes in this pastebin) since you helped determine what was going on? --> ((...snip...))
[16:55:39] <TD> go ahead

(freenode / #bitcoin-dev timestamps are Local NY time, Tuesday February 19, 2013)

[16:28:15] <TD> kuzetsa: can you do a du -h in your .bitcoin directory? where is the disk space being used?
[16:28:35] <kuzetsa> TD: no, I can't (this is on a windows 7 x64 node)
[16:28:44] <TD> ok
[16:28:49] <kuzetsa> actually... I can
[16:29:02] <kuzetsa> 1 sec, firing up msys-mingw (forgot I installed it the other day)


Sarah White@sghjkyh-PC /c/Users/Sarah White/AppData/Roaming/Bitcoin
$ cmd /c "dir /s"

((...snip...))
              13 File(s)  7,643,945,949 bytes

 Directory of c:\Users\Sarah White\AppData\Roaming\Bitcoin\blocks

((...snip...))
               6 File(s)  6,411,683,013 bytes

 Directory of c:\Users\Sarah White\AppData\Roaming\Bitcoin\blocks\index

((...snip...))
              22 File(s)     31,675,198 bytes

 Directory of c:\Users\Sarah White\AppData\Roaming\Bitcoin\chainstate

((...snip...))
              77 File(s)    212,170,807 bytes

 Directory of c:\Users\Sarah White\AppData\Roaming\Bitcoin\database

((...snip...))
               1 File(s)     10,485,760 bytes

     Total Files Listed:
             119 File(s) 14,309,960,727 bytes
              14 Dir(s)  131,977,035,776 bytes free

Sarah White@sghjkyh-PC /c/Users/Sarah White/AppData/Roaming/Bitcoin
$ du -h
31M     ./blocks/index
632M    ./blocks
203M    ./chainstate
11M     ./database
8.0G    .


[16:41:13] <kuzetsa> I find it awfully strange that du -h reports a different size for the "blocks" subfolder than dir/s does
[16:41:36] <kuzetsa> TD: you didn't comment on that
[16:41:56] <HM> my ~/.bitcoind is about 6.4 GiB if that helps
[16:41:57] <TD> it's doing something funny with hard-linking
[16:42:18] <kuzetsa> TD: oh
[16:42:39] <TD> your actual disk usage may be lower than it appears
[16:42:46] <TD> i'm not sure how hard-linked files are reported on windows
[16:42:55] <kuzetsa> by default, they're not

--- confirmed, using an administrative cmd prompt ---

C:\Users\Sarah White\AppData\Roaming\Bitcoin>for %i in (*.dat) do fsutil hardlink list %i

C:\Users\Sarah White\AppData\Roaming\Bitcoin>fsutil hardlink list blk0001.dat
\Users\Sarah White\AppData\Roaming\Bitcoin\blk0001.dat
\Users\Sarah White\AppData\Roaming\Bitcoin\blocks\blk00000.dat

C:\Users\Sarah White\AppData\Roaming\Bitcoin>fsutil hardlink list blk0002.dat
\Users\Sarah White\AppData\Roaming\Bitcoin\blk0002.dat
\Users\Sarah White\AppData\Roaming\Bitcoin\blocks\blk00001.dat

C:\Users\Sarah White\AppData\Roaming\Bitcoin>fsutil hardlink list blk0003.dat
\Users\Sarah White\AppData\Roaming\Bitcoin\blk0003.dat
\Users\Sarah White\AppData\Roaming\Bitcoin\blocks\blk00002.dat

[lucif]

It burned my iops earlier, now it burning CPU lol

But... kinda 4x time faster.

[grue]

bitcoin.org needs to be updated; the version on the site is 0.7.2