How important is it to upgrade to Bitcoin 0.13.1?

[RenegadeMind]

I'm currently running an older full node client (0.12.1), and not sure if there are any issues upgrading.

Are there any significant downsides to running 0.12.1?

Are there any significant upsides to running 0.13.1?

[Carlton Banks]

Compact Blocks and Segwit are the major features introduced for 0.13. Compact Blocks save alot of bandwidth usage, and improve mining efficiency in various ways. Segwit prepares the network for scaling up and increases the blocksize, but only for signatures (this leaves the pre-existing 1MB blockspace entirely free for other information about transactions)

The only major downside to remaining on 12.1 right now is specific to your internet connection; Compact Blocks make using low bandwidth connections more realistic. Segwit isn't activated yet, so lack of the ability to use it isn't yet relevant as a downside.

[RenegadeMind]

@Carlton Banks - Thanks. I'll likely hold off for a bit as I prefer to upgrade in a more paranoid fashion.

[Carlton Banks]

Probably a good idea, if it was expected that everyone was going to upgrade to a client that uses Segwit, there'd be little point in doing Segwit as a soft-fork.

You'll still be able to send and receive after the fork, and I believe that includes sending/receiving to the nested form of Segwit addresses (which are just regular P2SH addresses to older clients like 0.12.1). You'll be unable to send to the native P2WPKH and P2WSH types of addresses, but the scheme for those is not yet defined (and so not in the 13.1 package of soft-forks).

There's no real downside to being conservative about upgrading, as it will likely be a very long time before regular P2PKH and P2SH are deprecated, no-one's even suggesting that right now. FWIW, I'm still using 0.13.0, and don't intend to upgrade to 0.13.1 until after the fork activates.

[franky1]

no point upgrading.

after it activates then core will spoon feed out an actual fully functioning segwit release with full wallet functionality for segwit.

this 0.13.1 is just an empty gesture to make people feel like they are part of segwits desirability promotion. yet they are not part of the vote or veto power of true consensus.

[bitjoin]

Im running 0.11 or something like that on an old laptop, been downloading the blockchain and its taking forever.  This laptop is slow af but my question is do newer update version wallets make the blockchain sync quicker?

[achow101]

Im running 0.11 or something like that on an old laptop, been downloading the blockchain and its taking forever.  This laptop is slow af but my question is do newer update version wallets make the blockchain sync quicker?

Compared to 0.11, yes, newer versions of Bitcoin Core will sync faster. There have been numerous optimizations and improvements that decrease the sync time, although it can still take a long time.

[bitjoin]

Im running 0.11 or something like that on an old laptop, been downloading the blockchain and its taking forever.  This laptop is slow af but my question is do newer update version wallets make the blockchain sync quicker?

Compared to 0.11, yes, newer versions of Bitcoin Core will sync faster. There have been numerous optimizations and improvements that decrease the sync time, although it can still take a long time.

Perfect ty

[cr1776]

Im running 0.11 or something like that on an old laptop, been downloading the blockchain and its taking forever.  This laptop is slow af but my question is do newer update version wallets make the blockchain sync quicker?

Compared to 0.11, yes, newer versions of Bitcoin Core will sync faster. There have been numerous optimizations and improvements that decrease the sync time, although it can still take a long time.

Perfect ty

And before you go to 0.13.2, you might as well just go to 0.13.2 as there are bug fixes etc.

[bitjoin]

Im running 0.11 or something like that on an old laptop, been downloading the blockchain and its taking forever.  This laptop is slow af but my question is do newer update version wallets make the blockchain sync quicker?

Compared to 0.11, yes, newer versions of Bitcoin Core will sync faster. There have been numerous optimizations and improvements that decrease the sync time, although it can still take a long time.

Perfect ty

And before you go to 0.13.2, you might as well just go to 0.13.2 as there are bug fixes etc.

I went for the most recent one which was 0.13.2.  Already its downloading faster.

[LFC_Bitcoin]

@Carlton Banks - Thanks. I'll likely hold off for a bit as I prefer to upgrade in a more paranoid fashion.

Same here, I'm not upgrading to 0.13.1 just yet. I don't see the need to.