Bitcoin receives update, see what’s new

Version number 22.0 had the help of more than 100 people who made about 800 pull requests. This is the first major update since version 0.21.1, after the favorable signal for Taproot that occurred in June of this year.

See the list of major improvements.

Hardware wallet support in the interface

Although Bitcoin Core has supported hardware wallets since version 0.18.0, users needed to use commands to use the feature.

Already in version 0.20.0, the addition of a graphical user interface was added, but the user still needed to perform some processes manually to sign the transactions.

Bitcoin Core version 22.0 brings a friendlier interface for those who use hardware wallets, such as Trezor, KeepKey, Coldcard and others, to sign transactions.

Hardware wallets, or hardware wallets, are one of the safest ways to both store and sign transactions as this process is performed in an external environment.

I2P support

With governments proposing increasingly stricter laws for anyone who deals with Bitcoin in any way, even maintaining a network node, support for I2P comes to help with the anonymity of those who maintain the decentralized protocol.

I2P (Invisible Internet Project) is an anonymous communication network layer, much like Tor.

The purpose of both is to mask the IPs of both sides of the communication, although it is possible to know if a user is connected to this network, the transmitted data is encrypted.

Also, Tor version 2 support has been dropped, Bitcoin Core will only communicate with peers that are using version 3, as the previous one has been discontinued.

Taproot Support

The biggest Bitcoin update in recent times, Taproot, was approved by most miners in June and is scheduled to be activated in November of this year.

With Taproot users will be able to use Schnorr subscriptions, which make transactions lighter, cheaper, with greater anonymity. In addition, Taproot also paves the way for implementing smart contracts in Bitcoin.

Bitcoin Core 22.0 is now ready to work with this Bitcoin improvement, in full.

Curiosities

Bitcoin software client was created by Satoshi Nakamoto 12 years ago.

Older versions had the prefix 0, example: 0.21.1, from now on this number has been eliminated, leaving only 22.0 instead of 0.22.0.

Source: https://updateonbitcoin.com/bitcoin-receives-update-see-whats-new/