Notable changes

P2P and network changes

A bitcoind node will no longer rumour addresses to inbound peers by default. They will become eligible for address gossip after sending an ADDR, ADDRV2, or GETADDR message. (#21528)

Before this release, Bitcoin Core had a strong preference to try to connect only to peers that listen on port 8333. As a result of that, Bitcoin nodes listening on non-standard ports would likely not get any Bitcoin Core peers connecting to them. This preference has been removed. (#23542)

Full support has been added for the CJDNS network. See the new option -cjdnsreachable and doc/cjdns.md (#23077)

Fee estimation changes

Fee estimation now takes the feerate of replacement (RBF) transactions into account. (#22539) Rescan startup parameter removed

The -rescan startup parameter has been removed. Wallets which require rescanning due to corruption will still be rescanned on startup. Otherwise, please use the rescanblockchain RPC to trigger a rescan. (#23123)

Tracepoints and Userspace, Statically Defined Tracing support

Bitcoin Core release binaries for Linux now include experimental tracepoints which act as an interface for process-internal events. These can be used for review, debugging, monitoring, and more. The tracepoint API is semi-stable. While the API is tested, process internals might change between releases requiring changes to the tracepoints. Information about the existing tracepoints can be found under doc/tracing.md and usage examples are provided in contrib/tracing/.

Updated RPCs

The validateaddress RPC now returns an error_locations array for invalid addresses, with the indices of invalid character locations in the address (if known). For example, this will attempt to locate up to two Bech32 errors, and return their locations if successful. Success and correctness are only guaranteed if fewer than two substitution errors have been made. The error message returned in the error field now also returns more specific errors when decoding fails. (#16807)

The -deprecatedrpc=addresses configuration option has been removed. RPCs gettxout, getrawtransaction, decoderawtransaction, decodescript, gettransaction verbose=true and REST endpoints /rest/tx, /rest/getutxos, /rest/block no longer return the addresses and reqSigs fields, which were previously deprecated in 22.0. (#22650)

The getblock RPC command now supports verbosity level 3 containing transaction inputs' prevout information. The existing /rest/block/ REST endpoint is modified to contain this information too. Every vin field will contain an additional prevout subfield describing the spent output. prevout contains the following keys:

generated - true if the spent coins was a coinbase. height value scriptPubKey The top-level fee fields fee, modifiedfee, ancestorfees and descendantfees returned by RPCs getmempoolentry,getrawmempool(verbose=true), getmempoolancestors(verbose=true) and getmempooldescendants(verbose=true) are deprecated and will be removed in the next major version (use -deprecated=fees if needed in this version). The same fee fields can be accessed through the fees object in the result. WARNING: deprecated fields ancestorfees and descendantfees are denominated in sats, whereas all fields in the fees object are denominated in BTC. (#22689)

Both createmultisig and addmultisigaddress now include a warnings field, which will show a warning if a non-legacy address type is requested when using uncompressed public keys. (#23113)

Changes to wallet related RPCs can be found in the Wallet section below.

New RPCs

Information on soft fork status has been moved from getblockchaininfo to the new getdeploymentinfo RPC which allows querying soft fork status at any block, rather than just at the chain tip. Inclusion of soft fork status in getblockchaininfo can currently be restored using the configuration -deprecatedrpc=softforks, but this will be removed in a future release. Note that in either case, the status field now reflects the status of the current block rather than the next block. (#23508) Files

On startup, the list of banned hosts and networks (via setban RPC) in banlist.dat is ignored and only banlist.json is considered. Bitcoin Core version 22.x is the only version that can read banlist.dat and also write it to banlist.json. If banlist.json already exists, version 22.x will not try to translate the banlist.dat into json. After an upgrade, listbanned can be used to double check the parsed entries. (#22570) Updated settings

In previous releases, the meaning of the command line option -persistmempool (without a value provided) incorrectly disabled mempool persistence. -persistmempool is now treated like other boolean options to mean -persistmempool=1. Passing -persistmempool=0, -persistmempool=1 and -nopersistmempool is unaffected. (#23061)

-maxuploadtarget now allows human readable byte units [k|K|m|M|g|G|t|T]. E.g. -maxuploadtarget=500g. No whitespace, +- or fractions allowed. Default is M if no suffix provided. (#23249)

If -proxy= is given together with -noonion then the provided proxy will not be set as a proxy for reaching the Tor network. So it will not be possible to open manual connections to the Tor network for example with the addnode RPC. To mimic the old behavior use -proxy= together with -onlynet= listing all relevant networks except onion. (#22834)

Tools and Utilities

Update -getinfo to return data in a user-friendly format that also reduces vertical space. (#21832)

CLI -addrinfo now returns a single field for the number of onion addresses known to the node instead of separate torv2 and torv3 fields, as support for Tor V2 addresses was removed from Bitcoin Core in 22.0. (#22544)

Wallet

Descriptor wallets are now the default wallet type. Newly created wallets will use descriptors unless descriptors=false is set during createwallet, or the Descriptor wallet checkbox is unchecked in the GUI.

Note that wallet RPC commands like importmulti and dumpprivkey cannot be used with descriptor wallets, so if your client code relies on these commands without specifying descriptors=false during wallet creation, you will need to update your code.

Newly created descriptor wallets will contain an automatically generated tr() descriptor which allows for creating single key Taproot receiving addresses.

upgradewallet will now automatically flush the keypool if upgrading from a non-HD wallet to an HD wallet, to immediately start using the newly-generated HD keys. (#23093)

a new RPC newkeypool has been added, which will flush (entirely clear and refill) the keypool. (#23093)

listunspent now includes ancestorcount, ancestorsize, and ancestorfees for each transaction output that is still in the mempool. (#12677)

lockunspent now optionally takes a third parameter, persistent, which causes the lock to be written persistently to the wallet database. This allows UTXOs to remain locked even after node restarts or crashes. (#23065)

receivedby RPCs now include coinbase transactions. Previously, the following wallet RPCs excluded coinbase transactions: getreceivedbyaddress, getreceivedbylabel, listreceivedbyaddress, listreceivedbylabel. This release changes this behaviour and returns results accounting for received coins from coinbase outputs. The previous behaviour can be restored using the configuration -deprecatedrpc=exclude_coinbase, but may be removed in a future release. (#14707)

A new option in the same receivedby RPCs, include_immature_coinbase (default=false), determines whether to account for immature coinbase transactions. Immature coinbase transactions are coinbase transactions that have 100 or fewer confirmations, and are not spendable. (#14707)

GUI changes

UTXOs which are locked via the GUI are now stored persistently in the wallet database, so are not lost on node shutdown or crash. (#23065)

The Bech32 checkbox has been replaced with a dropdown for all address types, including the new Bech32m (BIP-350) standard for Taproot enabled wallets.

Low-level changes

RPC

getblockchaininfo now returns a new time field, that provides the chain tip time. (#22407) Tests

For the regtest network the activation heights of several softforks were set to block height 1. They can be changed by the runtime setting -testactivationheight=name@height. (#22818)