Dogecoin Core 1.14.6 Update

Owned by Egya (Unlicensed)
Last updated: Jul 25, 2022
4 min read

The Dogecoin Core v1.14.6 is a minor version release update to the core software designed to improve the security, network efficiency including modification to fee structure, introduction of a new RPC method, new REST endpoint to REST server and user interface.

All Dogecoin Core users - miners, services, relay operators and wallet users are recommended to upgrade.

 The update went live on Thursday 21st July 2022.

News - Dogecoin launches new update to improve security and efficiency (cointelegraph.com)

Dogecoin Core 1.14.6 Specification – Release Dogecoin Core 1.14.6 · dogecoin/dogecoin · GitHub

https://github.com/dogecoin/dogecoin/releases/tag/v1.14.6/

Evaluation Process

MidChains evaluates:

  • What is changing?

  • Analyse the impact of those changes.

What is Changing?

  • Security Update: This includes fixes that harden node and network security. These fixes are important for every node operator and wallet user. Below implementations were performed in the release to enhance security:

    • P2P System Removal

    • Hardened Transaction Download Mechanism

    • Hardened Protocol Implementation to Reject Buggy or Malformed Messages

    • Limit And Tightly Manage Memory Usage in Events of High Network Traffic or When Connected to Extremely Slow Peers.

  • Fee Recommendation: changes the recommended dust limit for all participants on the Dogecoin network from 1 DOGE to 0.01 DOGE. The full recommendation can be found in the documentation. This change has been implemented in the wallet as the default value of -discardthreshold. resulting in the following default logic:

    • The wallet will attempt to not create any outputs smaller than 0.03 DOGE as change if possible.

    • If after signing there is more than 0.01 DOGE left in the change output, the wallet will keep the output as-is.

    • If the change output drops under 0.01 DOGE, the wallet will discard the change and instead give it to miners as fee.

    • Any output under 0.01 DOGE will not be accepted as valid by default.

  • Configuration of a wallet backup directory: Added a new command line parameter -backupdir that allows operators to specify where to store wallet backups and dumps. When not set, the node will add a directory under the data directory called "backups".

  • Maximum number of addnode records: To protect against users accidentally submitting an insane amount of address records using the addnode RPC call, the maximum number of "addnode" records has been limited to 800, which is 100x the maximum number of manually added nodes that the software connects to (8). Once this maximum is reached, the software will refuse to add any more addresses and return an error. Users can remove existing addnode records from the software by running:

    Dogecoin-cli addnode <address> remove

  • Improve the traffic graph in the UI: Significantly improves the graph in the UI's traffic monitor by not throwing away data every time the graph scale got resampled, but instead keeping track of the traffic we see in the background and then rendering it on demand.

  • Improve the traffic graph in the UI: A new RPC method, rescan, has been added to allow node operators to rescan the chain for wallet transactions from a certain height. This can help speed up the rescan process for keys that are known to be generated after a certain date or block height, as older blocks do not necessarily require to be scanned in that scenario. This may also be helpful when adding large quantities of watchonly addresses.

  •  New REST endpoint: blockhashbyheight: A new endpoint has been added to the REST server to find the current best-known block at a certain height, without having to do RPC calls. This is useful for service implementations that need to track or query blocks. The new endpoint can be queried with:

    GET /rest/blockhashbyheight/<height>

  •  Translation Updates: Policies and tooling have been updated to enable translators better in their efforts to make Dogecoin more accessible to people that do not speak English. Updated translations includes Bulgarian, Dutch, French, Italian, Korean, Persian, Portuguese (pt_PT), Tamil

  •  RPC API Changes

    • The verifychain RPC command no longer accepts negative values

    • Added liststucktransactions

    • Added setmaxconnections

    • Added rescan

    • addnode will now return error -32 when the address provided is too long

    • getpeerinfo provides 2 new fields per peer, addr_processed and addr_rate_limited, that track addr message processing

    • dumpwallet and backupwallet now write their output to the configurable backup directory and do not overwrite existing files

  • Dependency Updates

    • Updated the default dependency zlib to 1.2.12.

    • Updated the default dependency libevent to 2.1.12-stable.

    • Update the LevelDB subtree to use the same version as Bitcoin 22.0, from the bitcoin-core maintained fork.

 Minor Changes

  • Added ARMv8 and ARMv82 crypto extensions as an experimental feature. This significantly improves the speed at which 64-bit ARM hardware can validate blocks and transactions.

  • Fixed the graphical wallet to properly display in High-DPI resolutions.

  • Improved privacy by preventing leaks of information about our wallet when setting the locktime field (automatically.)

  • Added scrypt to the benchmark code.

  • Change the granularity of data downloaded in the network tab to no longer display gigabytes and terrabytes, as this obscures too much detail. Instead, the largest unit is now megabytes.

  • Fixed a bug in the getutxos REST endpoint to also show data when not including the mempool.

  • Improved the tips displayed in the UI to be more concise and give better advice.

  • Removed information from the graphical wallet that was attempting to indicate stuck transactions based on peer-to-peer traffic, but this does not work since 1.14.2, and can be misleading (showing false positives and negatives.)

  • Improved and updated the bip list documentation that explains the protocol features implemented by Dogecoin Core.

  • Greatly improved the gitian-build script to ease doing deterministic builds for everyone, and the documentation of that process.

Impact Analysis

MidChains will support the Dogecoin Core v1.14.6 update. All deposits and withdrawals made after the update are expected to be processed without any impact.

Impact on Client Funds: No impact on client funds post network update. DOGE deposits, withdraws and trading are not affected.

Regulatory implications: None.

Maturity / Market Capitalization: None.

Security and Operations: Improved security and efficiency to ensure scalability.

Traceability / Monitoring: The Dogecoin Core v1.14.6 update will not have any effect on addresses; hence tracing will not differ.

Exchange Connectivity and Demand: No impact.

Type of Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT): Remains the same for Dogecoin

Innovation and Efficiency: Improved User UI and fee structure.