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Release history

A curated history of every Bitcoin Gold Core release. Use this page when planning an upgrade.

The full release notes (often 100+ KB each for major versions) are in the official wiki. This page gives you the upgrade headline for each version so you can decide whether to read the full notes.

Latest prerelease (unstable)

v0.21.3-beta is unstable. Do NOT run in production.

The GitHub release is marked prerelease: true — there is no stable v0.21.3 yet. Less widely deployed than 0.17.3 in the community. Verify that the Electrum server, Blockbook fork, and other downstream tools you use explicitly support it before upgrading.

v0.21.3-beta — prerelease (unstable, do not use in production)

Headline: Tracks the Bitcoin Core 0.21 line with the Bitcoin Gold (BTG)-specific changes layered on. More recent codebase than 0.17.3, but unstable and not recommended for production — the GitHub release is marked prerelease: true and there is no stable v0.21.3 yet. Verify that the Electrum server, Blockbook fork, and other downstream tools you use explicitly support it before upgrading.

Changes from v0.17.3 to v0.21.3-beta

A summary of the most important commits between the latest stable release (v0.17.3, 2020-08-01) and the v0.21.3-beta prerelease (2024-12-23). 24 commits in total. Source: git log v0.17.3..v0.21.3-beta.

Most important

  • [2021-04-09] DNS seed calls were broken on the new codebase — PR #415, commit cae5e1b1. src/chainparams.cpp was passing a true second argument to vSeeds.emplace_back(...) for every seed server. Under Bitcoin Core 0.21 that argument is no longer used the same way, so the seed servers were not being initialised correctly and a node starting up on the v0.21 code path would not populate its address manager from DNS seeds. The fix removed the stray true arguments for both mainnet and testnet. If you ran an early v0.21 build before this fix, your node did not auto-discover peers from the listed seeds.

  • [2024-12-20] DNS seed list updated to drop the hijacked domain — commit 893c6856. Replaced dnsseed.bitcoingold.org (hijacked — see Notable security incidents, 2024-07-15) with dnsseed.btgofficial.org, and replaced the long-dead dnsseed.emzy.de with dnsseed.4btg.org. Testnet seeds updated the same way.

  • [2024-12-22] Windows installer no longer overwrites icons on upgrade — PR #474, commits ccaf1399a / 74a84c530. NSIS SetDateSave off and the 64-bit-only installer name fix preserve the existing icon set across reinstall. Copyright year bumped to 2024 in configure.ac and build_msvc/bitcoin_config.h.

  • [2021-04-09] Qt transaction view: HTTPS-only explorer links — PR #414, commit 04027da3. Reported by Fabian Braeunlein of PS Positive Security GmbH. The transaction context menu was building explorer links regardless of scheme; now it only emits links whose URL scheme is https. Closes a mixed-content / MITM concern when the configured third-party explorer is http://.

  • [2024-07-12] README updated for the new official domain — PR #468, commit 28eaa062. All bitcoingold.org references rewritten to btgofficial.org.

  • [2022-07-12] Nix build errors fixed — PR #442, commit 462177b9. Added missing <functional> and <deque> includes, added using namespace std::placeholders; in src/validation.cpp. Required for builds under Nix with strict header hygiene.

  • [2021] Bulk v0.17 → v0.21 codebase upgrade — PR #438, commits 46335e8a through 96b51abf. The Bitcoin Gold (BTG)-specific patches (Equihash-BTG consensus, BTG genesis, LWMA DAA, block-reorg checkpoints, bgoldd daemon name, bitcoingold.conf) were rebased onto the Bitcoin Core 0.21 line. The gitian descriptors, contrib/, doc/, and depends/ were updated to match. This is the structural reason v0.21.3-beta has a substantially larger diff than the bug-fix commits above.

Smaller changes

  • 2024-05-16 — 3615775e: removed an accidentally-committed contrib/testgen/convert_btc_to_btg_bech32 binary and a duplicate #include <deque> in src/httpserver.cpp.
  • 2024-12-22 — f807b9ca: corrected a typo'd label in src/wallet/test/wallettests.cpp.

Latest stable

v0.17.3 — current widely-used release

Headline: Rolling-checkpoint finalization. Any block deeper than 9 blocks and older than 4800 s is marked final; conflicting chains deeper than the last finalized block are rejected. This is the single most important security upgrade in the v0.17 series.

New RPC: getfinalizedblockhash

Upgrade path: drop-in replacement for v0.17.1 / v0.17.2.

v0.17.2 — emergency security update

Headline: Emergency checkpoint at block 000000059ec8884fa4fbbdbe46c09cfb4ecba281dfa2351a05084e817c1200ae (height 640 650). Adopted by all major pools and exchanges before the 10 July 2020 deep-reorg attempt, which was successfully rejected.

Upgrade path: drop-in replacement for v0.17.1.

v0.17.1 — major sync improvement

Headline: Compact block support enabled; massive sync time improvement.

Breaking changes:

  • bitcoin.conf → bitcoingold.conf (auto-migrated if missing).
  • Wallet: new label / account API replaces deprecated account.
  • Configurations must be split into [main] / [test] / [regtest] sections.
  • Wallets created in 0.17.1+ are not compatible with versions prior to 0.17.1.

v0.15.0.2 — pre-finalization

Headline: Gitian deterministic build system added (Linux, ARM64, macOS, Raspberry Pi). This is when Bitcoin Gold (BTG) first had reproducible builds. Renamed config from bitcoin.conf to bitcoingold.conf. Removed the harmful -bootstrap flag.

Chronological summary

Version Date Significance
0.15.0.1 2017-11-12 Initial mainnet release post-fork (block 491 407).
0.15.0.2 2018-01-07 Reproducible builds + config rename.
0.15.1 2018-06-29 Mandatory upgrade around the Equihash transition.
0.15.2 2018-09-21 Post-LWMA DAA stabilization.
0.17.1 2020-02-28 Compact blocks. Major sync improvement.
0.17.2 2020-07-02 Emergency reorg-rejection checkpoint.
0.17.3 2020-08-01 Rolling-checkpoint finalization. The widely-deployed stable.
v0.21.3-beta 2024-12-23 Bitcoin Core 0.21 sync. Marked prerelease on GitHub. Less deployed.

Hard-fork heights (consensus-level)

Height What Why
491 407 Bitcoin Gold (BTG) mainnet launch Initial fork from Bitcoin (Equihash introduced; the N=144 K=5 BgoldPoW parameters come later).
536 200 July 2018 hardfork Activates Equihash-Bitcoin Gold (BTG) (N=144, K=5, personalization BgoldPoW) and switches to LWMA DAA, 45-block window.

Emergency actions

  • 2017-11-21 to 2017-11-26: Compromised Windows installers on GitHub. See Notable security incidents for the full writeup and SHA-256 sums of the malicious binaries.
  • 2020-07-02: Emergency v0.17.2 release ahead of a 1300+ block reorg attempt.
  • 2024-07-15: bitcoingold.org domain hijacked. New official URL: btgofficial.org.

What to do before upgrading

  1. Read the release notes in full for the target version.
  2. Check the wiki for breaking changes in bitcoingold.conf or the wallet.
  3. Back up wallet.dat if you have one.
  4. Stop the daemon, install the new binary, restart.
  5. Watch debug.log for the first 30 minutes of the new version.
  6. Don't auto-upgrade in production. The unattended-upgrades flow that works for the OS does not work for bgoldd.

Source