Litecoin Core v0.16.0 Release
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We are pleased to release Litecoin Core 0.16.0 release. This is a new major version release, including new features, various bugfixes and performance improvements, as well as updated translations. It is reccomended for all users to upgrade to this version.
Wallet changes
Segwit Wallet
Litecoin Core 0.16.0 introduces full support for segwit in the wallet and user interfaces. A new -addresstype argument has been added, which supports legacy, p2sh-segwit (default), and bech32 addresses. It controls what kind of addresses are produced by getnewaddress, getaccountaddress, and createmultisigaddress. A -changetype argument has also been added, with the same options, and by default equal to -addresstype, to control which kind of change is used.
A new address_type parameter has been added to the getnewaddress and addmultisigaddress RPCs to specify which type of address to generate. A change_type argument has been added to the fundrawtransaction RPC to override the -changetype argument for specific transactions.
All segwit addresses created through getnewaddress or *multisig RPCs explicitly get their redeemscripts added to the wallet file. This means that downgrading after creating a segwit address will work, as long as the wallet file is up to date.
All segwit keys in the wallet get an implicit redeemscript added without it being written to the file. This means recovery of an old backup will work as long as you use new software.
All keypool keys that are seen used in transactions explicitly get their redeemscripts added to the wallet files. This means that downgrading after recovering from a backup that includes a segwit address will work
Note that some RPCs do not yet support segwit addresses. Notably, signmessage/verifymessage doesn't support segwit addresses, nor does importmulti at this time. Support for segwit in those RPCs will continue to be added in future versions.
P2WPKH change outputs are now used by default if any destination in the transaction is a P2WPKH or P2WSH output. This is done to ensure the change output is as indistinguishable from the other outputs as possible in either case.
BIP173 (Bech32) Address support (“ltc1…” addresses)
Full support for native segwit addresses (BIP173 / Bech32) has now been added. This includes the ability to send to BIP173 addresses (including non-v0 ones), and generating these addresses (including as default new addresses, see above).
A checkbox has been added to the GUI to select whether a Bech32 address or P2SH-wrapped address should be generated when using segwit addresses. When launched with -addresstype=bech32 it is checked by default. When launched with -addresstype=legacy it is unchecked and disabled.
HD-wallets by default
Due to a backward-incompatible change in the wallet database, wallets created with version 0.16.0 will be rejected by previous versions. Also, version 0.16.0 will only create hierarchical deterministic (HD) wallets. Note that this only applies to new wallets; wallets made with previous versions will not be upgraded to be HD.
Wallets directory configuration (-walletdir)
Litecoin Core now has more flexibility in where the wallets directory can be located. Previously wallet database files were stored at the top level of the litecoin data directory. The behavior is now the following:
For new installations (where the data directory doesn’t already exist), wallets will now be stored in a new wallets/subdirectory inside the data directory by default.
For existing nodes (where the data directory already exists), wallets will be stored in the data directory root by default. If a wallets/ subdirectory already exists in the data directory root, then wallets will be stored in the wallets/ subdirectory by default.
The location of the wallets directory can be overridden by specifying a -walletdir=<path> option where <path> can be an absolute path to a directory or directory symlink.
Care should be taken when choosing the wallets directory location as funds may be lost if it becomes unavailable during operation.
Build: Minimum GCC bumped to 4.8.x
The minimum version of the GCC compiler required to compile Litecoin Core is now 4.8. No effort will be made to support older versions of GCC. See discussion in issue #11732 for more information. The minimum version for the Clang compiler is still 3.3. Other minimum dependency versions can be found in doc/dependencies.md in the repository.
Support for signalling pruned nodes (BIP159)
Pruned nodes can now signal BIP159’s NODE_NETWORK_LIMITED using service bits, in preparation for full BIP159 support in later versions. This would allow pruned nodes to serve the most recent blocks. However, the current change does not yet include support for connecting to these pruned peers.
Performance: SHA256 assembly enabled by default
The SHA256 hashing optimizations for architectures supporting SSE4, which lead to ~50% speedups in SHA256 on supported hardware (~5% faster synchronization and block validation), have now been enabled by default. In previous versions they were enabled using the --enable-experimental-asm flag when building, but are now the default and no longer deemed experimental.
GUI changes
The option to reuse a previous address has now been removed. This was justified by the need to “resend” an invoice. But now that we have the request history, that need should be gone.
Support for searching by TXID has been added, rather than just address and label.
A “Use available balance” option has been added to the send coins dialog, to add the remaining available wallet balance to a transaction output.
A toggle for unblinding the password fields on the password dialog has been added.
RPC changes
New rescanblockchain RPC
A new RPC rescanblockchain has been added to manually invoke a blockchain rescan. The RPC supports start and end-height arguments for the rescan, and can be used in a multiwallet environment to rescan the blockchain at runtime.
New savemempool RPC
A new savemempool RPC has been added which allows the current mempool to be saved to disk at any time to avoid it being lost due to crashes / power loss.
Safe mode disabled by default
Safe mode is now disabled by default and must be manually enabled (with -disablesafemode=0) if you wish to use it. Safe mode is a feature that disables a subset of RPC calls - mostly related to the wallet and sending - automatically in case certain problem conditions with the network are detected. However, developers have come to regard these checks as not reliable enough to act on automatically. Even with safe mode disabled, they will still cause warnings in the warnings field of the getneworkinfo RPC and launch the -alertnotify command.
Renamed script for creating JSON-RPC credentials
The share/rpcuser/rpcuser.py script was renamed to share/rpcauth/rpcauth.py. This script can be used to create rpcauthcredentials for a JSON-RPC user.
Validateaddress improvements
The validateaddress RPC output has been extended with a few new fields, and support for segwit addresses (both P2SH and Bech32). Specifically:
A new field iswitness is True for P2WPKH and P2WSH addresses ("ltc1..." addresses), but not for P2SH-wrapped segwit addresses (see below).
The existing field isscript will now also report True for P2WSH addresses.
A new field embedded is present for all script addresses where the script is known and matches something that can be interpreted as a known address. This is particularly true for P2SH-P2WPKH and P2SH-P2WSH addresses. The value for embedded includes much of the information validateaddress would report if invoked directly on the embedded address.
For multisig scripts a new pubkeys field was added that reports the full public keys involved in the script (if known). This is a replacement for the existing addresses field (which reports the same information but encoded as P2PKH addresses), represented in a more useful and less confusing way. The addresses field remains present for non-segwit addresses for backward compatibility.
For all single-key addresses with known key (even when wrapped in P2SH or P2WSH), the pubkey field will be present. In particular, this means that invoking validateaddress on the output of getnewaddress will always report the pubkey, even when the address type is P2SH-P2WPKH.
Low-level changes
The deprecated RPC getinfo was removed. It is recommended that the more specific RPCs are used:
getblockchaininfo
getnetworkinfo
getwalletinfo
getmininginfo
The wallet RPC getreceivedbyaddress will return an error if called with an address not in the wallet.
The wallet RPC addwitnessaddress was deprecated and will be removed in version 0.17, set the address_type argument of getnewaddress, or option -addresstype=[bech32|p2sh-segwit] instead.
dumpwallet now includes hex-encoded scripts from the wallet in the dumpfile, and importwallet now imports these scripts, but corresponding addresses may not be added correctly or a manual rescan may be required to find relevant transactions.
The RPC getblockchaininfo now includes an errors field.
A new blockhash parameter has been added to the getrawtransaction RPC which allows for a raw transaction to be fetched from a specific block if known, even without -txindex enabled.
The decoderawtransaction and fundrawtransaction RPCs now have optional iswitness parameters to override the heuristic witness checks if necessary.
The walletpassphrase timeout is now clamped to 2^30 seconds.
Using addresses with the createmultisig RPC is now deprecated, and will be removed in a later version. Public keys should be used instead.
Blockchain rescans now no longer lock the wallet for the entire rescan process, so other RPCs can now be used at the same time (although results of balances / transactions may be incorrect or incomplete until the rescan is complete).
The logging RPC has now been made public rather than hidden.
An initialblockdownload boolean has been added to the getblockchaininfo RPC to indicate whether the node is currently in IBD or not.
minrelaytxfee is now included in the output of getmempoolinfo
Other changed command-line options
-debuglogfile=<file> can be used to specify an alternative debug logging file.
litecoin-cli now has an -stdinrpcpass option to allow the RPC password to be read from standard input.
The -usehd option has been removed.
litecoin-cli now supports a new -getinfo flag which returns an output like that of the now-removed getinfo RPC.
Testing changes
The default regtest JSON-RPC port has been changed to 19443 to avoid conflict with testnet’s default of 19332.
Segwit is now always active in regtest mode by default. Thus, if you upgrade a regtest node you will need to either -reindex or use the old rules by adding vbparams=segwit:0:999999999999 to your regtest litecoin.conf. Failure to do this will result in a CheckBlockIndex() assertion failure that will look like: Assertion `(pindexFirstNeverProcessed != nullptr) == (pindex->nChainTx == 0)' failed.
Download Binaries
To download, please visit the download page here. Alternatively, you can view the download folder here.
Please use GPG to verify the integrity of the release binaries. This ensures that the binary you have downloaded has not been tampered with. Linux, MacOS and Win32 cygwin command line GPG instructions are available here. Please also note that we GPG sign the binaries as a convenience to you, the ultimate way to verify the integrity of the builds is to build them yourself using Gitian. Instructions on how to perform these builds, can be found here.
For this release, the binaries have been signed with key identifier FE3348877809386C (thrasher’s key).
WARNING
Despite this version being heavily tested, this version may still contain bugs. Always backup your wallet.dat file before upgrading. If you encounter any issues, please let us know by posting to the bug reporting section below.
Source code & Build instructions
The master branch contains the latest commits to the next stable releases of Litecoin Core.
litecoin-project/litecoin
litecoin?—?Litecoin source tree
github.com
Build instructions for Linux can be found here.
Build instructions for OSX can be found here.
Builds instructions for Windows can be found here.
Bug Reporting
Submit any issues you encounter here and one of the Litecoin developers will assist you.
litecoin-project/litecoin
litecoin?—?Litecoin source tree
github.com
Mailing Lists
Sign up for announcements only or development discussion.
litecoin-announce
Google Group
groups.google.com
litecoin-dev
Google Group
groups.google.com
Hashes for verification
These are the SHA-256 hashes of the released files:
108db1106539f48d3221420d14219177c81019b10b751fa923fe2b2376fe25eb litecoin-0.16.0-aarch64-linux-gnu.tar.gz
e49f8fba90e5c87000d0c8a91ddc305e3cfd3e34861f678f9220337db5fe79db litecoin-0.16.0-arm-linux-gnueabihf.tar.gz
edda17bdbcba596149cd94d9aa58e5d7975955a94ca9eac30892cbdeaea40ea8 litecoin-0.16.0-i686-pc-linux-gnu.tar.gz
d068934a905c3a15a3b32684751f68d7d46e8ce7a540436563659ef8ee4784f1 litecoin-0.16.0-osx64.tar.gz
93b451d180b2c60495595df00c303de6b8e135187d0d77bd542b9df917f50286 litecoin-0.16.0-osx.dmg
ee13921d34a5fa0c38ca6660514b1ae20f8d66ff366497a3368c7449ab6be541 litecoin-0.16.0.tar.gz
21718c1a60e66fdf55f8d0be0601fa5e7ed7c60bc74e1f08f6e8a470cc2859cd litecoin-0.16.0-win32-setup.exe
ae3294a61ddf41744166e35c4f564478a31dd4895f31cdcda7cf9f5e0cb94048 litecoin-0.16.0-win32.zip
629a4133cd6870562915df1da13a3600d559f5c0d3878eb00a4c1e925f4b9cf1 litecoin-0.16.0-win64-setup.exe
dd0317dde21ad89bbb6cd2d3b089362a12ebb5d65367147f7c96c465f03095c6 litecoin-0.16.0-win64.zip
5a1dfaea8d70f4d0d61190061631d6ad40cb3662e7718660000c43f564c348e6 litecoin-0.16.0-x86_64-linux-gnu.tar.gz
Credits
Thanks to everyone who directly contributed to this release:
The Bitcoin Core Developers
Adrian Gallagher
aunyks
coblee
cryptonexii
gabrieldov
Martin Smith
NeMO84
ppm0
romanornr
shaolinfry
spl0i7
stedwms
ultragtx
VKoskiv
voidmain
wbsmolen
xinxi
Thanks to ecurrencyhodler.
