v0.9.0-1: (Still) Rat Poison Squared on Steroids

This is a point release addressing some minor issues that slipped through with
the v0.9.0 release, mainly due to the rewrite of the pay plugin for
multi-part payment support.

For details on the changes included in this point release please refer to the
tracking issue #3928. We suggest upgrading to this version if:

• You are using a wallet that shows incorrect information due to missing
  fields in the RPC responses.
• Larger payments above 10,000 satoshis to non-public nodes fail due to the
  destination being unreachable.

We apologize for the inconvenience, and thank the community for the extensive
testing and feedback so far.

-- Christian

v0.9.0: Rat Poison Squared on Steroids

We're pleased to announce the 0.9.0 release of c-lightning, named by Sebastian Falbesoner.

This is a major release and includes new features, new integrations as well as
major internal refactorings facilitating extensions and future developments.

Highlights for Users

• We can now send multi-part payments as well as keysend spontaneous payments. This complements the support to receive these payments introduced in an earlier release.
  • Large payments will now be split automatically into multiple parts that are more likely to succeed right away, and better protect your privacy.
  • Should a payment not succeed at first we will adaptively split the amount and retry.
• We added support for watchtower plugins that help protect the node's funds while the node is not currently connected to the network.

Highlights for the Network

• Support for optional fields in some messages has been removed, reducing complexity and replacing them with the more modern TLV extensions
• Splitting payments into smaller parts with MPP increases the traffic on the network and improves privacy by making payments look more homogenous. The added traffic provides cover for other payments.

Highlights for Developers

• Extensible payment flow framework in libplugin allowing developers to write custom extensions without having to reinvent the wheel.
• Added RPC methods to create, sign and send PSBT transactions allowing c-lightning to be better integrated with wallets and higher-level protocols, such as coin-join and dual-funding.
• Added RPC methods to reserve and unreserve outputs controlled by the node to complement the PSBT support, for multi-step protocols.
• Added extensive accounting support in the form of the coin_movement hook that reports any change in the funds controlled by the node.
• Refactored the internals to use PSBT everywhere, leveraging libwally
• A number of new hooks and notifications were added to the plugin interface to allow deeper integration with c-lightning

More details can be found at https://github.com/ElementsProject/lightning/blob/v0.9.0/CHANGELOG.md

Thanks to everyone for their contributions and bug reports; please keep them coming.

Since 0.8.2, we've had 523 commits from 21 different authors.
A special thanks goes to the 8 first time contributors:

• Aiden McClelland @dr-bonez
• Candle @CandleHater
• Joe Miyamoto @joe.miyamoto
• Michal Rostecki @mrostecki
• Reza @rbndg
• Sebastian Falbesoner @theStack
• Vincenzo Palazzo @vincenzopalazzo
• @mb300sd

Cheers,

Christian, Rusty, ZmnSCPxj, and Lisa

v0.9.0rc4

v0.9.0rc4

v0.9.0rc3

v0.9.0rc3

v0.9.0rc2

v0.9.0rc2

v0.9.0rc1

v0.9.0rc1

v0.8.2.1: (Still) Scaling the Ethereum Blockchain

This is a point release, with a single change: it makes large-channels compatible with Eclair (and, incompatible with v0.8.2 c-lightning), as reported by @mb300sd in #3703.

• If you never enabled large-channels in your configuration file, this is exactly the same as v0.8.2.
• If you did, you won't be able to open any channels with large-channel-supporting Eclair node (e.g. Bitrefill) using v0.8.2: they will get an error when they try to announce. You need to upgrade to v0.8.2.1.
• If you already have large channels (i.e. between c-lightning nodes), they'll continue to work just fine.

We apologize for the mistake, and we are (too slowly) developing protocol tests to ensure this kind of issue does not occur in future.

v0.8.2

v0.8.2 Scaling the Ethereum Blockchain

We're pleased to announce the 0.8.2 release of c-lightning, named by @arowser.

This is a minor release and includes a few new and experimental features, as well as bug-fixes and performance wins.

Highlights for Users

• New config option --large-channels (also known as 'wumbo') which enables opening channels of any size. (Note that your peer must also support large channels.)
• This release includes a keysend plugin, which will enable receiving 'keysend' payments, as first introduced by Lightning Labs. Note that the included keysend plugin is receive only for this release. Nodes which do not want the hassle of spontaneous unrequested payments should add 'disable-plugin=keysend' to their config!
• We'll now announce multiple connection endpoints for a single 'type', e.g. multiple IPv4 addresses.
• A new FAQ!
• Big performance improvment in the pay command (~1s speedup on average)

Highlights for the Network

• c-lightning nodes can now participate in creating larger channels (with the --large-channel config option).
• We now wait until the first payment through a channel before updating the feerate; this should help with some spurious closures at channel open or re-connect that were occurring against older versions of other implementations.

Highlights for Developers

• A new command getsharedsecret for getting the BOLT-compliant shared secret finding for a node and a point.
• The API for the 'Bitcoin backend' plugin infrastructure has been documented!
• Facilities for building rendez-vous compatible onions has been added to the onion devtool
• Plugin options will now respect the type they were given in the manifest.
• Fixes with plugin cleanups and hangs.
• Python2 has been removed as a dependence.

More details can be found at https://github.com/ElementsProject/lightning/blob/v0.8.2/CHANGELOG.md

Thanks to everyone for their contributions and bug reports; please keep them coming.

Since 0.8.1, we've had 236 commits from 10 different authors, with 2 first time contributors:

• Dr. Maxim Orlovsky @dr-orlovsky
• Dave Scotese @dscotese

Cheers,

Lisa, Christian, Rusty, and ZmnSCPxj

v0.8.1: Channel to the Moon

We're pleased to announce 0.8.1, named by @vasild (who last release was a new committer!)

Despite the holiday break and Rusty's month off, commit numbers are only down 20%!

Highlights for Users

• We now support gifting msat to the peer when opening a channel, via push_msat, providing a brand new way to lose money!
• Invoice routehints can be overridden using exposeprivatechannels: try setting to [] to eliminate all of them to fit your invoice in twitter messages!
• Wallet withdraw transactions now set nLocktime, making them blend in more with other wallets.
• Preliminary support for plugins hooks which can replace the default bitcoin-cli with other blockchain querying methods (API may change in future releases though!).
• listforwards now records the outgoing short_channel_id, even if it wasn't possible to start forwarding.

Highlights for the Network

• Plugins can set additional feature bits, for more experimentation.
• More than one plugin can register for the htlc_accepted hook: others will become multi-user in future releases.
• Documentation updates, which had lagged recent changes.
• Prevent a case where grossly unbalanced channels could become unusable.

More details can be found in https://github.com/ElementsProject/lightning/blob/v0.8.1/CHANGELOG.md

Thanks to everyone for their contributions and bug reports; please keep them coming!

Since 0.8.0 we've had 257 commits from 17 different authors, with 5 first-time contributors!

• Niklas Claesson @NickeZ
• @minidisk1147
• Ken Sedgwick @ksedgwic
• Zoe Faltibà @zoedberg
• Glen Cooper @GlenCooper

Cheers,
Rusty, Lisa, Christian, and ZmnSCPxj.

v0.8.0: Blockchain Good, Orange Coin Bad

We're pleased to announce 0.8.0, named by m-schmoock

Time to move to the real world, by making Bitcoin mainnet the default network.

Highlights for Users

⚠️ The default network and the default location of the lightning home directory changed. Please make sure that the configuration, key file and database are moved into the network-specific subdirectory. ⚠️

• We now support receiving multi-part payments, a first step towards a more unified user experience, allowing users to bundle their channel capacities, and generally care less about whom to peer with. Support for sending is currently manual only: pay won't do it yet.
• Bitcoin mainnet is now the default network, no more --network=bitcoin needed for all you reckless users 😉
• Nodes will now use a network-dependent subdirectory, so you can run nodes for multiple networks without having to specify different --lightning-dirs.
  • Existing nodes should automatically move existing databases and hsm_secret files into the correct subdirectory. If the node does not appear to load correctly please ensure that the move was performed
    correctly.
• Config files can now be structured into multiple files using the include statement. This allows reusing common configuration options across multiple nodes.
• The rpc_command hook allows intercepting JSON-RPC requests, and arbitrarily modify them. For example this can be used to authenticate an incoming RPC request before executing it.

Highlights for the Network

• If you are a developer you might want to check out the new createonion and sendonion RPC calls which will allow you to build custom protocol extensions on top of c-lightning
• The newer TLV style payloads in the routing onions are now stable and can be used both for classical payments as well as in custom onions created by createonion.
• Invoices now add an s field for a "payment secret" which can avoid some payment probing attacks, and the pay command now uses that field if present.
• We now send what networks we support on connection: this detects accidentally connecting mainnet and testnet node (harmless, but useless).

More details can be found in https://github.com/ElementsProject/lightning/blob/v0.8.0/CHANGELOG.md

Thanks to everyone for their contributions and bug reports; please keep them coming!

Since 0.7.3 we've had 305 commits from 16 different authors, with 6 first-time contributors!

• Michael Schmoock @m-schmoock
• Gorazd Kovacic @gorazdko
• Richard Myers @RichardMyers
• Vasil Dimov @vasild
• Sebastian Geisler @sgeisler
• Jarret Dyrbye @jarret

Cheers,
Lisa, Rusty, Christian, and ZmnSCPxj.