Litecoin Core v0.15.1 Release

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We are pleased to release Litecoin Core 0.15.1 release. This is a new minor version release, including new features, various bug fixes and performance improvements, as well as updated translations. It is recommended for all users to upgrade to this version.

A number of changes to the way Litecoin Core deals with peer connections and invalid blocks have been made, as a safety precaution against blockchain forks and misbehaving peers.

• Unrequested blocks with less work than the minimum-chain-work are now no longer processed even if they have more work than the tip (a potential issue during IBD where the tip may have low-work). This prevents peers wasting the resources of a node.
• Peers which provide a chain with less work than the minimum-chain-work during IBD will now be disconnected.
• For a given outbound peer, we now check whether their best known block has at least as much work as our tip. If it doesn’t, and if we still haven’t heard about a block with sufficient work after a 20 minute timeout, then we send a single getheaders message, and wait 2 more minutes. If after two minutes their best known block has insufficient work, we disconnect that peer. We protect 4 of our outbound peers from being disconnected by this logic to prevent excessive network topology changes as a result of this algorithm, while still ensuring that we have a reasonable number of nodes not known to be on bogus chains.
• Outbound (non-manual) peers that serve us block headers that are already known to be invalid (other than compact block announcements, because BIP 152 explicitly permits nodes to relay compact blocks before fully validating them) will now be disconnected.
• If the chain tip has not been advanced for over 7.5 minutes, we now assume the tip may be stale and will try to connect to an additional outbound peer. A periodic check ensures that if this extra peer connection is in use, we will disconnect the peer that least recently announced a new block.
• The set of all known invalid-themselves blocks (i.e. blocks which we attempted to connect but which were found to be invalid) are now tracked and used to check if new headers build on an invalid chain. This ensures that everything that descends from an invalid block is marked as such.

The minimum relay fee -minrelayfee has been lowered to 0.01 lites per kB (0.00001 LTC). This is to prepare for dropping the minimum transaction fee to 0.1 lites per kB (0.0001 LTC) in the next release.

Mempool replacement --mempoolreplacement has been disabled by default.

Though blockmaxweight has been preferred for limiting the size of blocks returned by getblocktemplate since 0.13.0, blockmaxsize remained as an option for those who wished to limit their block size directly. Using this option resulted in a few UI issues as well as non-optimal fee selection and ever-so-slightly worse performance, and has thus now been deprecated. Further, the blockmaxsize option is now used only to calculate an implied blockmaxweight, instead of limiting block size directly. Any miners who wish to limit their blocks by size, instead of by weight, will have to do so manually by removing transactions from their block template directly.

The GUI settings will now be written to guisettings.ini.bak in the data directory before wiping them when the -resetguisettings argument is used. This can be used to retroactively troubleshoot issues due to the GUI settings.

Previously, it was possible to open the same wallet twice by manually copying the wallet file, causing issues when both were opened simultaneously. It is no longer possible to open copies of the same wallet.

A hidden debug argument -minimumchainwork has been added to allow a custom minimum work value to be used when validating a chain.

• The “currentblocksize” value in getmininginfo has been removed.
• dumpwallet no longer allows overwriting files. This is a security measure as well as prevents dangerous user mistakes.
• backupwallet will now fail when attempting to backup to source file, rather than destroying the wallet.
• listsinceblock will now throw an error if an unknown blockhash argument value is passed, instead of returning a list of all wallet transactions since the genesis block. The behaviour is unchanged when an empty string is provided.

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).

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.

The master branch contains the latest commits to the next stable releases of Litecoin Core.

Build instructions for Linux can be found here.

Build instructions for OSX can be found here.

Builds instructions for Windows can be found here.

Submit any issues you encounter here and one of the Litecoin developers will assist you.

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These are the SHA-256 hashes of the released files:

686acf75f76befd39ca8b3a6b3ea86e52775fc33220970cd6db9e75c6bb814dc litecoin-0.15.1-aarch64-linux-gnu.tar.gz
38df3210486dfe1af59b0db713be7c5567158dda6510efc92e76b5c3adfa7602 litecoin-0.15.1-arm-linux-gnueabihf.tar.gz
8559c17d4b7ca77c2b8844d9013cf4a7e575515263deae06c64f4c5da1486a12 litecoin-0.15.1-i686-pc-linux-gnu.tar.gz
2bb565a77779be4ed5b186c93891bc0a12352c94316a1fc44388898f7afb7bc2 litecoin-0.15.1-osx64.tar.gz
e33039232541c190a1529323b6d872d986f8b14bc2fcb8763721de52ed9f9096 litecoin-0.15.1-osx.dmg
d5b2b12b7d7817ad0db5abb54fb06cd37e5379db1b89c72d656df3ba59d355be litecoin-0.15.1.tar.gz
97fd13845045475a62e5707ded25d5be75ea1c4d89080418dcba7a670ee46dad litecoin-0.15.1-win32-setup.exe
7885caabac4968480511b502621670edbb7b0661378cb8a6da86450a74c83d94 litecoin-0.15.1-win32.zip
71d430481e5064ad56e793b81f1d5e5f9f811107794a95c6ad751a3bee9d6e99 litecoin-0.15.1-win64-setup.exe
eae66242ef66ee22f403ade0c2795ff74f6654bf3fc546e99bde2e6e4c9e148f litecoin-0.15.1-win64.zip
77062f7bad781dd6667854b3c094dbf51094b33405c6cd25c36d07e0dd5e92e5 litecoin-0.15.1-x86_64-linux-gnu.tar.gz

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
• ultragtx
• VKoskiv
• voidmain
• xinxi