Full announcement (including signatures)
Bitcoin v0.3.24 is now available for download at http://sourceforge.net/projects/bitcoin/files/Bitcoin/bitcoin-0.3.24/
This is another bug fix release. We had hoped to have wallet encryption ready for release, but more urgent fixes for existing clients were needed – most notably block download problems were getting severe. Wallet encryption is ready for testing at https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/352 for the git-savvy, and hopefully will follow shortly in the next release, v0.4.
Notable fixes in v0.3.24, and the main reasons for this release:
- Block downloads were failing or taking unreasonable amounts of time to complete, because the increased size of the block chain was bumping up against some earlier buffer-size DoS limits.
- Fix crash caused by loss/lack of network connection.
Notable changes in v0.3.24:
- DNS seeding enabled by default.
- UPNP enabled by default in the GUI client. The percentage of bitcoin clients that accept incoming connections is quite small, and that is a problem. This should help. bitcoind, and unofficial builds, are unchanged (though we encourage use of “-upnp” to help the network!).
- Initial unit testing framework. Bitcoin sorely needs automated tests, and this is a beginning. Contributions welcome.
- Internal wallet code cleanup. While invisible to an end user, this change provides the basis for v0.4’s wallet encryption.
