January
01-07 Bitcoin Core releases statement: Bitcoin is a “peer-to-peer version of electronic cash that allows online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution”. Our vision for Bitcoin is to expand the flexibility of the system to work efficiently at extremely high scale, while at the same time maintaining security and the core properties of decentralization that make Bitcoin unique.
01-14 Lightning Whitepaper Day: Official release of the Lightning Network Whitepaper by Joseph Poon and Thaddeus Dryja.
01-21 Launch of Segregated Witness Testnet.1
01-26 A detailed explanation of SegWit Benefits is published on the Bitcoin Core Blog.
01-28 Bitcoin Core releases statement called ““Clarifying Communications”” and shares contact and participation information with links to #bitcoin-core-dev IRC channel on Freenode, GitHub https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin and the the bitcoin-dev mailing list < http://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/”
February
02-23 Release of Bitcoin Core v0.12.0.2
02-26 First successful Zero-Knowledge Contingent Payment (ZKCP) on the Bitcoin network.
March
- 03-15 Bitcoin Core starts providing opt-in, announcement-only information for users of Bitcoin Core to receive notifications of security issues and new releases
April
- 4-15 Bitcoin Core release 0.12.1.3
June
06-07 Compact Blocks FAQ released, explaining compact block relay, BIP152, a method of reducing the amount of bandwidth used to propagate new blocks to full nodes.
06-08 Version bits FAQ for miners published. The version bits BIP9 system is a way to introduce backward compatible rule changes to the Bitcoin consensus rules, known as a soft fork.”
06-21 CSV softfork - Important upgrade instructions for miners.
July
- 07-09 Second Bitcoin Halving cuts block subsidy from 25 to 12.5.
August
- 08-02 A major bitcoin exchange, Bitfinex, was hacked and nearly 120,000 BTC (around $60m) was stolen.4
November
- The Swiss Railway operator SBB (CFF) upgraded all their automated ticket machines so that bitcoin could be bought from them using the scanner on the ticket machine to scan the bitcoin address on a phone app.5
This development began with a research effort by Bitcoin Core developer, Dr. Pieter Wuille, initially focused on addressing transaction malleability, a longstanding and well-known concern and priority. However, in the process of this research, and in the narrowing toward a solution, additional properties of the solution were discovered that allow for increasing the block size while also simultaneously opening up some incredibly exciting secondary benefits. This effort was initiated by Dr. Pieter Wuille, but included contributions from many others, with particular thanks to Eric Lombrozo, Johnson Lau, Alex Morcos, Nicolas Dorier, Bryan Bishop, Gregory Maxwell, Peter Todd, Cory Fields, Suhas Daftuar, and Luke-Jr. Popular wallets and supporting libraries have stated they will support Segwit including Ledger, Trezor, Electrum, and Bitgo. ↩
Outlook: “The release of Version 0.12 will be a major move forward for the Bitcoin Core client. However, there is still much more to do and we’re always looking for more contributors. For more details see our contributing page https://bitcoincore.org/en/contribute/” ↩
This maintenance update includes the first soft fork deployment utilising “version bits” as part of the capacity increases roadmap. ↩