Bitcoin-Qt 0.8.0

thegenesisblock.com / By Phillip Archer / Sep 4, 2013

An upgrade to Bitcoin-qt was released today and consists of several security and bug fixes bundled for release as version 0.8.4. It is recommended that all users upgrade immediately, since the release of these fixes makes finding the vulnerabilities in older code trivial. Included in this release are three security updates as well as several small bug fixes that were causing the application to crash or databases to become corrupted.

Denial of Service Fix

Bitcoin-qt 0.8.0 introduced Bloom Filters which allow for more flexibility with respect to how much of the block chain must be downloaded. Bloom Filters are a compact data structure that allows for some false-positives but no false-negatives, which implies you can be certain all of your data will be included in a query, but there may be some results included that are not related.

Bloom Filters allowed for the implementation of simplified payment verification (SPV) clients – which only download block headers and do not need to store all transactions in the block chain locally. These clients query nodes instead. For example, a client could query a node with an address to retrieve all relevant transactions and verify them with the block header information.