Just a notice that namecoin-qt v0.3.76rc1, which by virtue of continued support and development is the recommended client to emerge from a confusing year or two, is released as v0.3.76.
v0.3.76rc1
Set default fee per kb to 0.005NMC (phelix)
Several optimizations to improve handling of large/many network transactions (Domob)
Only accept finished transactions (phelix)
Relay transaction size limited to 20kb (consensus/phelix)
Increased network relay fee MIN_RELAY_TX_FEE to 100000 (RyanC/Indolering/phelix)
More restrictive filtering of transactions
Update to OpenSSL1.0.1i (phelix)
Better drive performance on disk based systems through less fragmentation (Domob)
"Renew" GUI Button (Domob)
contrib/easywinbuilder: Qt5/MinGW4.8.2/cleanup (phelix)
Qt5 compatibility (Canercandan/phelix)
New command line / .conf file option: -walletpath=customwalletfilename.dat (digital-dreamer)
"Pay To" in the Qt can be used to send coins also to a name, like "sendtoname" (Domob)
New RPC block info: height, confirmations, chainwork, nextblockhash. Change: No previousblockhash for block 0 (RyanC)
The RPC interface now returns an error while initialising, instead of not accepting connections at all (Domob)
v0.3.75
Add difficulty to RPC block output JSON (Domob)
Bitcoin port: skip signature verification on blocks before last checkpoint (phelix)
New checkpoint at 182000
Update to OpenSSL1.0.1h (security fix for SSL http RPC)
Czech localization (digital-dreamer)
Windows installer script for Innsetup (phelix)
Enforce value length of 520 characters in RPC and Qt (Domob)
New command line argument -dbstats runs a DB file storage statistics analysis and prints it to the debug log. (Domob)
Atomic handling of TxDB/NameDB operations, DB code cleanup and optimization. (Domob)
Even smaller blkindex.dat. Not backward compatible. It will take a while for the rewrite on the first start. (Domob)
Further announcement and binaries:
https://forum.namecoin.info/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=1975Relay transaction size and other transaction handling changes in this release are fixes for the under-reported problem that nearly stalled merge-mining on the Namecoin network:
An unknown party (The Aggregator) began consolidating a massive volume (50,000-100,000K) of unspent outputs into a single address. However, namecoind has extreme difficulty selecting outputs to spend in a wallet containing tens of thousands of unspent outputs. The Aggregator appears to have attempted to address this by writing a script which manually built transactions spending 50 or 100 of those unspent outputs to a new address.
The problem is that each of these transactions were 17-30 KB and rather than the standard transaction fee of 0.005NMC per KB (rounded up), a flat fee of 0.005NMC was used. Namecoin, like Bitcoin actually has two fee values, MIN_TX_FEE (used by miners) and MIN_RELAY_TX_FEE (used by all other full nodes). This enables MIN_TX_FEE to be lowered down to MIN_RELAY_TX_FEE without nodes who haven’t yet upgraded refusing to forward transactions with the new lower fee. On Bitcoin, the ratio between MIN_TX_FEE and MIN_RELAY_TX_FEE is 5:1, but due to an oversight it was 50:1 in Namecoin. The result was that The Aggregator’s transactions had a large enough fee to be forwarded throughout the network, but were considered “insufficient fee/free” transactions by miners. Since there is very limited space in blocks for such transactions, they just kept building up in the miners’ memory pools. The volume of transactions soon began causing the merge-mining software run by pools to time-out trying to get work.