The Bitcoin Core development team released the latest update on Nov. 24 to Bitcoin (BTC)’s original software client — the nineteenth in the coin’s eleven-year history. Releasing Bitcoin Core 0.19.0 (eventually 0.19.0.1 in the available download version, following the discovery of a last-minute issue) was overseen by lead maintainer Wladimir J. van der Laan and was reportedly developed by over a hundred contributors over a roughly six month period. New wallet format, better SegWit interoperability As Aaron van Wirdum has revealed, 0.19.0.1 includes a range of performance improvements, updates and bug fixes, resulting from 550 merged pull requests. The “bech32” …

Cryptocurrency payment processor BitPay may soon find it harder to do business as developers plan to remove support for the way it creates payment addresses. BitPay address support may disappear from Bitcoin In a GitHub discussion about the future 0.19.0 release of the Bitcoin Core client, developers continued plans to disable BIP70 by default, and possibly remove it altogether in a later version. The proposal first appeared in March this year, with activity to make it a reality ongoing. BitPay has stuck to using the payment address format defined in BIP70. Other wallets and payment businesses have joined the majority …

Bitcoin Core contributor Michael Ford, aka “fanquake,” has been awarded a $60,000 grant by the parent firm of top crypto derivatives platform BitMEX. In an official announcement published on July 12, BitMEX owner and operator HDR Global Trading revealed its decision to award Ford the grant, noting that he has just recently been made the latest official maintainer of the Bitcoin Core software project. This means that the developer’s key has been added to the “trusted keys list” file on GitHub — giving him the ability to merge in changes to the Bitcoin Core codebase. HDR Global Trading has presented …

Figures published by bitcoin core developer Luke Dashjr show that more than half of the full nodes in the bitcoin network are still running client software vulnerable to the inflation bug discovered in September 2018. This revelation poses some danger to the network, as software vulnerabilities are a clear and present danger to the fidelity of bitcoin (BTC). Now that the top-ranked cryptocurrency is in the midst of a positive price run, it is perhaps important that steps are taken to eradicate the inflation bug problem for good. Most bitcoin full nodes still vulnerable to the inflation bug As reported …

Ethereum (ETH) has the most developers working on its base protocol of all cryptocurrencies, not counting community project developers, according to a report by crypto asset management firm Electric Capital. The report was published in a Medium post on March 7. Per the post, the company fingerprinted over 20,000 code repositories and 16 million commits to obtain data, which reveals that on average 216 developers contribute code to ETH repositories every month. The company also specifies that this data “is undercounting the number of Ethereum developers since we do not include ecosystem projects like Truffle.” Bitcoin (BTC), the largest of …

The Schnorr-based multi-signature scheme MuSig, a test code for a potential upgrade to the Bitcoin (BTC) blockchain, has been released by blockchain tech firm Blockstream, according to an announcement published on Feb. 18. Last January, four Bitcoin developers released a paper outlining how Schnorr multi-signatures (‘multisig’) could help scale the Bitcoin blockchain, saying that the technology could reduce its transaction size and “improve both performance and user privacy in Bitcoin”. In the paper, the developers state that MuSig is designed as “a protocol that allows a group of signers to produce a short, joint signature on a common message.” Today’s …

Perceptions of Bitcoin (BTC) versus altcoins changed forever in 2018, as the largest cryptocurrency separated itself from the rest, Bitcoin developer Jimmy Song wrote in a blog post on Dec. 31. An ardent defender of Bitcoin’s decentralized values, Song, who is also a frequent social media commentator, argued that last year “showed [...] what Bitcoin Maximalists have been saying all along.” “Bitcoin is different because Bitcoin is decentralized,” he summarized, adding: “The advantages of decentralization are often subtle and easy to dismiss, but they are real benefits.” One of many sources to have criticized the initial coin offerings (ICO) market …

Software vulnerabilities continue to be a red flag issue in crypto community. Not long ago, the top-five cryptocurrency EOS network experienced a vulnerability right in the dawn of its development. The same thing happened to Ethereum, when a series of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks led to a significant delay in the operation of the nodes. And the news about another bug in the code came out yesterday, with the announcement made by Monero developers to patch the vulnerability, which allowed attackers to burn funds. It could seem that such kind of bug can affect any crypto, but not …

Coming every Sunday, the Hodler’s Digest will help you to track every single important news story that happened this week. The best (and worst) quotes, adoption and regulation highlights, leading coins, predictions, and much more — a week on Cointelegraph in one link. Top Stories This Week Japanese Cryptocurrency Exchange Zaif Hacked Of Reported 5,966 Bitcoins As a result of a security breach on September 14, hackers have managed to steal 4.5 billion yen from Japan’s Zaif cryptocurrency exchange, as well as 2.2 billion yen from the assets of the company, with total losses amounting to 6.7 billion yen or …

Bitcoin Core developers published a “full disclosure” of the vulnerability affecting several implementations of the Bitcoin (BTC) client Friday, September 21, repeating calls for all nodes to upgrade to the latest version as a priority. In addition to technical details about the bug, known as CVE-2018-17144, the disclosure explains how developers dealt with the threat to the Bitcoin network, along with a timeline of its discovery and patching in Bitcoin Core version 0.16.3. “In order to encourage rapid upgrades, the decision was made to immediately patch and disclose the less serious Denial of Service vulnerability, concurrently with reaching out to …

Bitcoin Core has released an update following the recent detection of a vulnerability in the software, according to a September 18 press release by the Bitcoin Core Project. According to the statement, Bitcoin Core 0.16.3 was released with a fix for a denial-of-service (DoS) vulnerability. The vulnerability could reportedly cause a crash of older versions of Bitcoin Core if they attempted processing a block transaction that tries to spend the same amount twice. According to the press release, such blocks can be only created by a miner since they are invalid. In order to create such block, a miner would …

Bitcoin Core version 0.16.1, a new major version including new features and performance improvements, has been officially released, according to an announcement made June 15. The new release reportedly includes “new features, various bugfixes and performance improvements, as well as updated translations.” Notably, this Bitcoin Core version removed miner block size recalling the deprecation of the “-blockmaxsize” option for miners to limit their blocks’ sizes in version 0.15.1. It states that miners now should apply “-blockmaxweight” option if they want to limit the weight of their blocks. Additionally, the upgrade affected wallets which were created in 0.16 and later. They …