14 DAY TRIAL // The Bitcoin Project has announced a handsome bounty for anyone who is able to find the bug behind a nasty corruption issue with the Bitcoin P2P digital currency tool.
Available for Mac, Windows, and Linux computers alike, Bitcoin 0.8.6 comes with a number of fixes and enhancements, such as increased default block size for miners, lower maximum size for free transaction creation, and OSX block chain database corruption fixes.
Apparently, these corruption fixes are not complete in Bitcoin 0.8.6, as the Bitcoin Project is offering up a $10,000 / €7,266 bounty to the person who is able to locate the remaining issues.
According to The Genesis Block, “After LevelDB was implemented to store the block chain in 0.8, some users of the Mac OS X software client suffered corruption issues.”
Amid some inconsistent reports (that were not always replicable), the consensus was that OS X 10.8 and 10.9 users were mostly affected. Restarting the client provides a temporary fix.
Other solutions include an upgraded version of LevelDB 1.13 and adjustments to the syncing and writing functions, according to the report.
“It remains to be seen whether this will completely resolve the corruption issues users have noticed, but there is a $10,000 bounty available for the person who can provide a definitive solution,” The Genesis Block adds.
Other fixes and tweaks in Bitcoin 0.8.6 are listed below, followed by the download links.
- Use fcntl with `F_FULLSYNC` instead of fsync on OSX - Use native Darwin memory barriers - Replace use of mmap in leveldb for improved reliability (only on OSX) - Fix nodes forwarding transactions with empty vins and getting banned - Network code performance and robustness improvements - Additional debug.log logging for diagnosis of network problems, log timestamps by default - Fix Bitcoin-Qt startup crash when clicking dock icon on OSX - Fix rare GUI crash on send - Various small GUI, documentation, and build fixes