A new upgrade to the Bitcoin Core software is now live, with the inclusion of a new P2P protocol version that would reduce the risks of eclipse attacks on miners.

Bitcoin developers have released the latest upgrade to Bitcoin Core, the underlying software that runs the blockchain of the largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization.

PSA:
Bitcoin Core maintains the two latest MAJOR releases. I.e. after the release of v26.0, you may see MINOR releases to fix issues in the v26 and v25 branches, but the v24 branch has reached “Maintenance End” and v23 has reached “End of Life”.

Details: https://t.co/JrPZzrGMCO

— Murch (@murchandamus) December 6, 2023

The ‘v26.0’ upgrade will introduce a new Bitcoin P2P transport protocol called v2, which will address many of the drawbacks that prevail in the current version, particularly in the context of attackers.

Some of these issues include unauthenticated connections, potential incursions to privacy based on the way data is relayed, and eclipse attacks that misdirect miners to accept invalid or confirmed transactions that could lead to a double-spend attack. 

The v2 protocol would set up an encrypted connection between two nodes, impeding eavesdropping by forcing an attacker to become active, and in a sense be discovered by network participants. 

“Our goal includes making opportunistic encryption ubiquitously available, as that provides the best defense against large-scale attacks,” wrote the developers. 

Some of the other features include faster node bootstrapping with a UTXO snapshot, which would bring nodes online instantly, as opposed to a full sync which could take hours.

Some Bitcoin developers have indicated that the next version of Bitcoin Core, v27, might mark the end of the Bitcoin Ordinals’ inscriptions. 

The surge in popularity of these inscriptions has led to high levels of congestion on the network of late, and Bitcoin Core developer Luke Dashjr claims that these inscriptions are spamming the blockchain by exploiting a vulnerability in the software.

The bug fix was recently fixed in an upgrade to Bitcoin Knots, which is a derivative of Bitcoin Core with a collection of improvements backported from and sometimes maintained outside of the master git tree. Some of its features, however, have not been tested to the same extent as they have in Bitcoin Core.

Ocean, a decentralized mining Bitcoin protocol, said it had implemented the Bitcoin Knots upgrade which would address the “long-standing vulnerability exploited by modern spammers.”

We are happy to announce testing of Bitcoin Knots v25.1 has completed successfully, and is now deployed to production. Among other improvements, this upgrade fixes this long-standing vulnerability exploited by modern spammers. As a result, our blocks will now include many more… https://t.co/II3y0B6Pu4

— OCEAN (@ocean_mining) December 6, 2023

However, some Bitcoin proponents viewed the move as “pro-censorship” and criticized Ocean for filtering these transactions.

On the other hand, Dashjr, who is also the chief technology officer at Ocean, still claims that Ordinals have been “an attack on Bitcoin from the start” and the damage it’s doing to Bitcoin is “huge and irreversible.”