This is a major release of Litecoin Core, featuring the technical equivalent of Bitcoin v0.10.2 but with Litecoin specific patches.
On a general level, most of what is new is is hidden where block synchronization and various internals are considerably faster and more efficient, and it has several major privacy improvements. The most significant changes include:
Watch-only wallet support. This allows the wallet to track transactions to and form wallets for which you know the address of but do not have the private key to.
Faster blockchain synchronization due to headers-first synchronization and support for downloading blocks in parallel. Downloading the blockchain is now much quicker and can be completed within a few hours instead of taking days for some users.
A REST interface which allows unauthenticated access to public node data when the -rest flag is specified.
RPC Server “Warm-Up” Mode which starts earlier than previous versions. This helps users or services relying on it know that the server has already started and will be available soon.
Improved signing security. This is due to using the libsecp256k1 library for signing instead of OpenSSL. libsecp256k1 is a cryptographic library optimized for elliptic curve uses which Litecoin relies on and was created by Bitcoin Core developer Pieter Wuille. Featuring better security, via hardening against timing leaks and derandomization, this library is believed to be better tested and more thoroughly reviewed than the implementation in OpenSSL.
New utility applications including litecoin-tx for transaction related functionality and litecoin-cli for RPC command line functionality as litecoind no longer accepts them.
Strict DER encoding for signatures (BIP 66). This introduces block version 3 and a new consensus rule which prevents non-standard transactions from being included in blocks. This also removes the dependency on OpenSSL’s signature parsing. Eventually, libsecp256k1 will be used for all consensus related tasks, depreciating the need for OpenSSL entirely.
The major user-visible features that were new in Bitcoin v0.9 and v0.10 are not actually new for Litecoin v0.10 because we backported it to Litecoin v0.8 (like Coin Control).
For a complete list of Litecoin Core specific changes, you can view the release notes here.
For a complete list of Bitcoin Core specific changes, you can view the release notes here.
What’s New in version v0.10.2.2?
Litecoin v0.10.2.2 is a minor release from the previous release candidate, featuring improvements and bug fixes. The changes can be seen below:
Added option -alerts’ to opt out of the network alert system. Please note that disabling network alerts should only be used by power users as this system is used for network emergencies and important security releases. The default behavior is that network alerts are enabled.
Detect and reject LibreSSL. This prevents a non-approved SSL library being used for compiling Litecoin Core, preventing potential consensus compatibility issues.
Improved getbalance RPC functionality to allow the user to display zero confirmation transactions (this works with watch-only addresses as well).
PID file bug fix for non-Windows based systems.
Bug fix for signing and verifying messages.
New GPG Signing Process
To enhance the security of Litecoin Core releases, we have changed the GPG signing procedure and opted for one of the Litecoin development team members to individually sign the release binaries.
Prior to this, we used a team signing key. The problem with this is that if the key were to be compromised, we would not be able to identify the member of who it was obtained from. Switching to this new procedure allows us to pinpoint the leak, revoke the individual key and leads to further decentralization of the build process.
As with any release, please use GPG to verify the integrity of the release binaries. This ensures that the binary you have downloaded has not been tampered with. Linux, MacOS and Win32 cygwin command line GPG instructions are available here. Please also note that we GPG sign the binaries as a convenience to you, the ultimate way to verify the integrity of the builds is to build them yourself using Gitian.
source: http://blog.litecoin.org/2015/06/litecoin-v01022.html
Guugll
http://www.guugll.eu/litecoin-v0-10-2-2/
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