This release of btcd is primarily to act as a catchup for the various changes that have accumulated and to help move back to a more regular schedule.

Verifying the Release

In order to verify the release, you'll need to have gpg or gpg2 installed on your system. Once you've obtained a copy (and hopefully verified that as well), you'll first need to import the keys that have signed this release if you haven't done so already:

Once you have the required PGP keys, you can verify the release (assuming manifest-v0.21.0-beta.txt and manifest-v0.21.0-beta.txt.sig are in the current directory) with:

gpg --verify manifest-v0.21.0-beta.txt.sig

You should see the following if the verification was successful:

gpg: assuming signed data in 'manifest-v0.21.0-beta.txt'
gpg: Signature made Fri 28 Aug 2020 12:40:24 PM EDT
gpg:                using DSA key 0DB39EAF526568682088EEDFB15210D35378BD54
gpg: Good signature from "John C. Vernaleo <john@netpurgatory.com>" [ultimate]

That will verify the signature of the manifest file, which ensures integrity and authenticity of the archive you've downloaded locally containing the binaries. Next, depending on your operating system, you should then re-compute the sha256 hash of the archive with shasum -a 256 <filename>, compare it with the corresponding one in the manifest file, and ensure they match exactly.

Verifying the Release Binaries

As of this release, our release binaries are fully reproducible thanks to go1.13! Third parties are now able to verify that the release binaries were produced properly without having to trust the release manager(s). See our reproducible builds guide for how this can be achieved. The release binaries are compiled with go1.14, which is required by verifiers to arrive at the same ones.

Finally, you can also verify the tag itself with the following command:

git verify-tag v0.21.0-beta

You should see something along the lines of this in the case of a valid tag:

gpg: Signature made Fri 28 Aug 2020 09:58:10 AM EDT
gpg:                using DSA key 0DB39EAF526568682088EEDFB15210D35378BD54
gpg: Good signature from "John C. Vernaleo <john@netpurgatory.com>" [ultimate]

Building the Contained Release

Users are able to rebuild the target release themselves without having to fetch any of the dependencies. In order to do so, assuming that vendor.tar.gz and btcd-source-v0.21.0-beta.tar.gz are in the current directory, follow these steps:

tar -xvzf vendor.tar.gz
tar -xvzf btcd-source-v0.21.0.tar.gz
GO111MODULE=on go install -v -mod=vendor
GO111MODULE=on go install -v -mod=vendor ./cmd/btcctl

The -mod=vendor flag tells the go build command that it doesn't need to fetch the dependencies, and instead, they're all enclosed in the local vendor directory.

Additionally, it's also possible to use the enclosed release.sh script to bundle a release for a specific system like so:

BTCBUILDSYS="linux-arm64 darwin-amd64" ./build/release/release.sh

Release Notes

Network-related changes:

• Handle notfound messages from peers in netsync package. (#1603)

RPC changes:

• The Verbose and VerboseTx boolean fields in btcjson.GetBlockCmd have been replaced with a single integer field called Verbosity, to reflect the new getblock RPC call parameters introduced in Bitcoin Core 0.15.0. (#1529)

  The getblock RPC server command in btcd has also been updated with this change. Backwards compatibility has been maintained in rpcclient. (#1577)

• Added an optional Params field to rpcclient.ConnConfig, to represent the network that the server is running. (#1467)

• Added a new error code ErrRPCInWarmup in btcjson. (#1541)

• Updated btcjson.GetMempoolEntryResult to reflect the new getmempoolentry response in Bitcoin Core 0.19.0. (#1524)

• Implemented rpcclient methods to invoke estimatesmartfee and generatetoaddress JSON-RPC commands. (#1500)

• Implemented rpcclient method to invoke getblockstats JSON-RPC command. (#1500)

• Parse serialized transaction from createrawtransaction JSON-RPC command using both segwit, and legacy format. (#1502)

• Support cookie-based authentication using a new CookiePath field in rpcclient.ConnConfig. (#1460)

• Implemented rpcclient method to invoke getchaintxstats JSON-RPC command. (#1571)

• Implemented rpcclient method to invoke fundrawtransaction JSON-RPC command. (#1553)

• Implemented rpcclient method to invoke getbalances JSON-RPC command. (#1595)

• Added a new method rpcclient.GetTransactionWatchOnly to support passing the include_watchonly argument to gettransaction JSON-RPC command. (#1592)

Crypto changes:

• Fixed panic in fieldVal.SetByteSlice when called with a value larger than 32 bytes. The improved version is approximately 35% faster. (#1602)

btcctl changes:

• Added -regtest mode to btcctl. (#1556)

Misc changes:

• Fixed a bug due to a deadlock in connmgr's dynamic ban scoring. (#1509)
• Replaced TravisCI with GitHub Actions. (#1575)
• Improved chain state init efficiency. (#1580)
• Added blockchain.NewUtxoEntry() to directly create entries for UtxoViewpoint. (#1588)
• Switch to a generic LRU implementation in the peer package, from decred/dcrd. (#1599)

Changelog

The full list of changes since v0.21.0-beta can be found here:

• https://github.com/btcsuite/btcd/compare/v0.20.1-beta..v0.21.0-beta

Contributors (Alphabetical Order)

Anirudha Bose Antonin Hildebrand Dan Cline Daniel McNally David Hill Federico Bond George Tankersley Henry Henry Harder Iskander Sharipov Ivan Kuznetsov Jake Sylvestre Javed Khan JeremyRand Jin John C. Vernaleo Kulpreet Singh Mikael Lindlof Murray Nesbitt Nisen Olaoluwa Osuntokun Oliver Gugger Steven Roose Torkel Rogstad Tyler Chambers Wilmer Paulino Yash Bhutwala adiabat jalavosus mohanson qqjettkgjzhxmwj qshuai shuai.qi tpkeeper