Bitcoin Unlimited Adds ABC Client Upgrade Features for November’s Hard Fork

The Bitcoin Unlimited development team have published the full node clients’ Bitcoin Cash edition version 1.5.0, which includes an implementation of all the November 15 upgrade features from Bitcoin ABC. According to the development team, support for the Bitcoin SV team’s ruleset is “pending” and Bitcoin Unlimited’s lead programmer, Andrew Stone, has explained he would like to see miners voting on ABC and SV changes using the BIP135 bits standard.

Also read: BCH Devcon Streamlines Bitcoin Innovation in San Francisco

Bitcoin Unlimited Latest Version Adds Bitcoin ABC’s Ruleset Changes

The Nov. 15 Bitcoin Cash network hard fork is approaching quickly and on Sunday the Bitcoin Unlimited (BU) programmers published BU version 1.5.0. The latest BU client is fully compatible with the BCH chain and previous hard fork consensus changes that took place in the past. BU’s 1.5.0 comes with some notable changes in contrast to the previous client release. Team developer Andrea Suisani (Sickpig) detailed that the BU software includes canonical transaction ordering (CTOR), the opcode OP_Checkdatasigverify (CDSV), an enforced “clean stack” rule, a “push only” rule for script-sig, a 100-byte minimum transaction size and more.

This version means the BU implementation will be fully compatible with Bitcoin ABC’s ruleset changes, and on Twitter the developers have explained that SV support is “pending.” On the Reddit forum r/btc, BU’s lead developer Andrew Stone explained he hopes miners use the voting system the team collaborated on with the Bitcoin XT developers.   

“What I would really like to see is miners start voting based on the BIP135 bits that we defined together with Bitcoin XT — Miners that support the Nov. 15 hard fork could start voting for the SV features they support,” Stone stated on the forum. “Miners that don’t support the hard fork (even if that miner will follow the hash power majority come Nov. 15) should start using BIP135 to vote for the features it supports. A vote for a feature is basically saying ‘I like the feature, but I want a different activation mechanism.’”

BIP135 Voting, Grace Periods, and Bitcoin SV

Stone further detailed that if there is a significant amount of votes showing a majority consensus then they should stop the November fork or start BIP135 activation. The engineer continues by explaining that people don’t have to run BU to vote on these features as miners can set the BIP135 bits in their block version fields using mining pool software. Following these statements, a BCH community member asked the programmer if the BIP135 system enabled the features automatically.

“BIP135 voting does enable the features automatically, but after a 3-month 75% or greater “yes” and a 3-month “grace” (time to implement the feature) period — So plenty of time,” Stone replied.

Bitcoin Cash enthusiasts seemed pleased with BU’s new release on social media channels and forums. As the upgrade date gets closer, the Bitcoin SV team of developers have launched their latest full node client 0.1.0 release. In contrast to previous releases, the new code includes all three consensus changes which include re-enabled opcodes, more opcodes per script, and the 128MB block size increase. With Bitcoin SV dropping the newest version, BU may add the SV additions to the full node implementation, but as Stone stated, either way miners can now favor certain proposals using BIP135. 

Right now it’s hard to tell what will happen, as most of the community seems to be split on both sets of consensus changes and they are supporting the side they think will be best suited for the BCH network. News.Bitcoin.com spoke with the BU team developer Andrea Suisani and asked him if miners could choose to vote for all of the upgrade features proposed by both ABC and SV, or a mixture of each camp’s Nov. 15 features. Suisani explained miners could vote on all of the features proposed and even a mix. “This is the actual point of BIP135,” the programmer added. Now the pressing question remains: What will the BCH mining pools support come Nov. 15?  

What do you think about Bitcoin Unlimited’s latest version that includes Bitcoin ABC’s ruleset changes? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments section below.

Images via Shutterstock, and Bitcoin Unlimited and Bitcoin SV.  

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