Subject: [Bitcoin-development] Project status

From: Gavin Andresen <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 13 Sep 2011 10:43:27 -0400

0.4 RELEASE

Bitcoin version 0.4 release candidate 2 looks stable; I've been
running a slightly-modified version of it on the Faucet website with
no issues for a couple of days now, and am not aware of any
show-stopper issues.

I built and uploaded OSX binaries to github:
  https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/downloads

Windows and Linux binaries will appear as soon as our "gitian-capable"
builders get a minute to create them (Jeff and Matt have been busy
with real life or their day jobs).

I'd like to switch from distributing binaries on SourceForge to
distributing them on GitHub, since GitHub supports https downloads.

NEXT RELEASE

If you have patches waiting to be pulled, now would be a good time to
rebase them; I expect minimal-to-no changes between release candidate
2 and the final 0.4 release.

And, if you haven't already, write up a little test plan and/or add
some unit tests.

The big planned feature for next release is switching from wxWidgets
to qt for the GUI client.

ON THE RADAR

I'm going to start separate discussions about a few need-deep-thinking issues:

1) There is a bug/design flaw in bitcoin's difficulty adjustment
algorithm. More generally, there have been nagging issues surrounding
how bitcoin handles time that I think need to be addressed.

2) I'm going to submit pull requests for an implementation of the
"don't talk to misbehaving peers" idea. That should proactively
prevent a whole swath of potential denial-of-service attacks, but if I
got it wrong it could be very bad for the network.

3) I'd really like to come to consensus on one or more
'multi-signature' standard transactions to enable much better wallet
backup and security.

Lets talk about those three issues in separate threads.

-- 
--
Gavin Andresen