Is Bitcoin Core version 23.0 now available

Yes Launched with new features, various bug fixes, and performance

How to Upgrade

If you are running an older version, shut it down. Wait until it has completely
shut down (which might take a few minutes in some cases), then run the
installer (on Windows) or just copy over /Applications/Bitcoin-Qt (on Mac)
or bitcoind/bitcoin-qt (on Linux).

Upgrading directly from a version of Bitcoin Core that has reached its EOL is
possible, but it might take some time if the data directory needs to be migrated. Old
wallet versions of Bitcoin Core are generally supported.

Compatibility

Bitcoin Core is supported and extensively tested on operating systems
using the Linux kernel, macOS 10.15+, and Windows 7 and newer.  Bitcoin
Core should also work on most other Unix-like systems but is not as
frequently tested on them.  It is not recommended to use Bitcoin Core on
unsupported systems.

Notable changes

P2P and network changes

A bitcoind node will no longer rumour addresses to inbound peers by default.
They will become eligible for address gossip after sending an ADDR, ADDRV2,
or GETADDR message. (#21528)

Before this release, Bitcoin Core had a strong preference to try to connect only to peers that listen on port 8333. As a result of that, Bitcoin nodes listening on non-standard ports would likely not get any Bitcoin Core peers connecting to them. This preference has been removed. (#23542)

Full support has been added for the CJDNS network. See the new option -cjdnsreachable and doc/cjdns.md (#23077)

Fee estimation changes

Fee estimation now takes the feerate of replacement (RBF) transactions into
account. (#22539)

Rescan startup parameter removed

The -rescan startup parameter has been removed. Wallets which require
rescanning due to corruption will still be rescanned on startup.
Otherwise, please use the rescanblockchain RPC to trigger a rescan. (#23123)

Tracepoints and Userspace, Statically Defined Tracing support

Bitcoin Core release binaries for Linux now include experimental tracepoints which
act as an interface for process-internal events. These can be used for review,
debugging, monitoring, and more. The tracepoint API is semi-stable. While the API
is tested, process internals might change between releases requiring changes to the
tracepoints. Information about the existing tracepoints can be found under
doc/tracing.md and
usage examples are provided in contrib/tracing/.

Updated RPCs

The validateaddress RPC now returns an error_locations array for invalid
addresses, with the indices of invalid character locations in the address (if
known). For example, this will attempt to locate up to two Bech32 errors, and
return their locations if successful. Success and correctness are only guaranteed
if fewer than two substitution errors have been made.
The error message returned in the error field now also returns more specific
errors when decoding fails. (#16807)

The -deprecatedrpc=addresses configuration option has been removed.  RPCs
gettxout, getrawtransaction, decoderawtransaction, decodescript,
gettransaction verbose=true and REST endpoints /rest/tx, /rest/getutxos,
/rest/block no longer return the addresses and reqSigs fields, which
were previously deprecated in 22.0. (#22650)

The getblock RPC command now supports verbosity level 3 containing transaction inputs'
prevout information.  The existing /rest/block/ REST endpoint is modified to contain
this information too. Every vin field will contain an additional prevout subfield
describing the spent output. prevout contains the following keys:

generated - true if the spent coins was a coinbase.
height
value
scriptPubKey
The top-level fee fields fee, modifiedfee, ancestorfees and descendantfees
returned by RPCs getmempoolentry,getrawmempool(verbose=true),
getmempoolancestors(verbose=true) and getmempooldescendants(verbose=true)
are deprecated and will be removed in the next major version (use
-deprecated=fees if needed in this version). The same fee fields can be accessed
through the fees object in the result. WARNING: deprecated
fields ancestorfees and descendantfees are denominated in sats, whereas all
fields in the fees object are denominated in BTC. (#22689)

Both createmultisig and addmultisigaddress now include a warnings
field, which will show a warning if a non-legacy address type is requested
when using uncompressed public keys. (#23113)

Changes to wallet related RPCs can be found in the Wallet section below.

New RPCs

Information on soft fork status has been moved from getblockchaininfo
to the new getdeploymentinfo RPC which allows querying soft fork status at any
block, rather than just at the chain tip. Inclusion of soft fork
status in getblockchaininfo can currently be restored using the
configuration -deprecatedrpc=softforks, but this will be removed in
a future release. Note that in either case, the status field
now reflects the status of the current block rather than the next
block. (#23508)

Files

On startup, the list of banned hosts and networks (via setban RPC) in
banlist.dat is ignored and only banlist.json is considered. Bitcoin Core
version 22.x is the only version that can read banlist.dat and also write
it to banlist.json. If banlist.json already exists, version 22.x will not
try to translate the banlist.dat into json. After an upgrade, listbanned
can be used to double check the parsed entries. (#22570)

Updated settings

In previous releases, the meaning of the command line option
-persistmempool (without a value provided) incorrectly disabled mempool
persistence.  -persistmempool is now treated like other boolean options to
mean -persistmempool=1. Passing -persistmempool=0, -persistmempool=1
and -nopersistmempool is unaffected. (#23061)

-maxuploadtarget now allows human readable byte units [k|K|m|M|g|G|t|T].
E.g. -maxuploadtarget=500g. No whitespace, +- or fractions allowed.
Default is M if no suffix provided. (#23249)

If -proxy= is given together with -noonion then the provided proxy will
not be set as a proxy for reaching the Tor network. So it will not be
possible to open manual connections to the Tor network for example with the
addnode RPC. To mimic the old behavior use -proxy= together with
-onlynet= listing all relevant networks except onion. (#22834)

Tools and Utilities

Update -getinfo to return data in a user-friendly format that also reduces vertical space. (#21832)

CLI -addrinfo now returns a single field for the number of onion addresses
known to the node instead of separate torv2 and torv3 fields, as support
for Tor V2 addresses was removed from Bitcoin Core in 22.0. (#22544)

Wallet

Descriptor wallets are now the default wallet type. Newly created wallets
will use descriptors unless descriptors=false is set during createwallet, or
the Descriptor wallet checkbox is unchecked in the GUI.

Note that wallet RPC commands like importmulti and dumpprivkey cannot be
used with descriptor wallets, so if your client code relies on these commands
without specifying descriptors=false during wallet creation, you will need
to update your code.

Newly created descriptor wallets will contain an automatically generated tr()
descriptor which allows for creating single key Taproot receiving addresses.

upgradewallet will now automatically flush the keypool if upgrading
from a non-HD wallet to an HD wallet, to immediately start using the
newly-generated HD keys. (#23093)

a new RPC newkeypool has been added, which will flush (entirely
clear and refill) the keypool. (#23093)

listunspent now includes ancestorcount, ancestorsize, and
ancestorfees for each transaction output that is still in the mempool.
(#12677)

lockunspent now optionally takes a third parameter, persistent, which
causes the lock to be written persistently to the wallet database. This
allows UTXOs to remain locked even after node restarts or crashes. (#23065)

receivedby RPCs now include coinbase transactions. Previously, the
following wallet RPCs excluded coinbase transactions: getreceivedbyaddress,
getreceivedbylabel, listreceivedbyaddress, listreceivedbylabel. This
release changes this behaviour and returns results accounting for received
coins from coinbase outputs. The previous behaviour can be restored using the
configuration -deprecatedrpc=exclude_coinbase, but may be removed in a
future release. (#14707)

A new option in the same receivedby RPCs, include_immature_coinbase
(default=false), determines whether to account for immature coinbase
transactions. Immature coinbase transactions are coinbase transactions that
have 100 or fewer confirmations, and are not spendable. (#14707)

GUI changes

UTXOs which are locked via the GUI are now stored persistently in the
wallet database, so are not lost on node shutdown or crash. (#23065)

The Bech32 checkbox has been replaced with a dropdown for all address types, including the new Bech32m (BIP-350) standard for Taproot enabled wallets.

Low-level changes

RPC

getblockchaininfo now returns a new time field, that provides the chain tip time. (#22407)

Tests

For the regtest network the activation heights of several softforks were
set to block height 1. They can be changed by the runtime setting
-testactivationheight=name@height. (#22818)

Credits

Thanks to everyone who directly contributed to this release:

0xb10c
0xree
Aaron Clauson
Adrian-Stefan Mares
agroce
aitorjs
Alex Groce
amadeuszpawlik
Amiti Uttarwar
Andrew Chow
Andrew Poelstra
Andrew Toth
anouar kappitou
Anthony Towns
Antoine Poinsot
Arnab Sen
Ben Woosley
benthecarman
Bitcoin Hodler
BitcoinTsunami
brianddk
Bruno Garcia
CallMeMisterOwl
Calvin Kim
Carl Dong
Cory Fields
Cuong V. Nguyen
Darius Parvin
Dhruv Mehta
Dimitri Deijs
Dimitris Apostolou
Dmitry Goncharov
Douglas Chimento
eugene
Fabian Jahr
fanquake
Florian Baumgartl
fyquah
Gleb Naumenko
glozow
Gregory Sanders
Heebs
Hennadii Stepanov
hg333
HiLivin
Igor Cota
Jadi
James O'Beirne
Jameson Lopp
Jarol Rodriguez
Jeremy Rand
Jeremy Rubin
Joan Karadimov
John Newbery
Jon Atack
João Barbosa
josibake
junderw
Karl-Johan Alm
katesalazar
Kennan Mell
Kiminuo
Kittywhiskers Van Gogh
Klement Tan
Kristaps Kaupe
Kuro
Larry Ruane
lsilva01
lucash-dev
Luke Dashjr
MarcoFalke
Martin Leitner-Ankerl
Martin Zumsande
Matt Corallo
Matt Whitlock
MeshCollider
Michael Dietz
Murch
naiza
Nathan Garabedian
Nelson Galdeman
NikhilBartwal
Niklas Gögge
node01
nthumann
Pasta
Patrick Kamin
Pavel Safronov
Pavol Rusnak
Perlover
Pieter Wuille
practicalswift
pradumnasaraf
pranabp-bit
Prateek Sancheti
Prayank
Rafael Sadowski
rajarshimaitra
randymcmillan
ritickgoenka
Rob Fielding
Rojar Smith
Russell Yanofsky
S3RK
Saibato
Samuel Dobson
sanket1729
seaona
Sebastian Falbesoner
sh15h4nk
Shashwat
Shorya
ShubhamPalriwala
Shubhankar Gambhir
Sjors Provoost
sogoagain
sstone
stratospher
Suriyaa Rocky Sundararuban
Taeik Lim
TheCharlatan
Tim Ruffing
Tobin Harding
Troy Giorshev
Tyler Chambers
Vasil Dimov
W. J. van der Laan
w0xlt
willcl-ark
William Casarin
zealsham
Zero-1729