Bitcoin Unlimited Adds ABC Client Upgrade Features for November’s Hard Fork

The Nov. 15 Bitcoin Cash network hard fork is approaching quickly and on Sunday the Bitcoin Unlimited (BU) programmers published BU version 1.5.0.

The latest BU client is fully compatible with the BCH chain and previous hard fork consensus changes that took place in the past.

BU’s 1.5.0 comes with some notable changes in contrast to the previous client release.

Team developer Andrea Suisani (Sickpig) detailed that the BU software includes canonical transaction ordering (CTOR), the opcode OP_Checkdatasigverify (CDSV), an enforced “clean stack” rule, a “push only” rule for script-sig, a 100-byte minimum transaction size and more.

This version means the BU implementation will be fully compatible with Bitcoin ABC’s ruleset changes, and on Twitter the developers have explained that SV support is “pending.”

On the Reddit forum r/btc, BU’s lead developer Andrew Stone explained he hopes miners use the voting system the team collaborated on with the Bitcoin XT developers.   

“What I would really like to see is miners start voting based on the BIP135 bits that we defined together with Bitcoin XT — Miners that support the Nov. 15 hard fork could start voting for the SV features they support,” Stone stated on the forum.

“Miners that don’t support the hard fork (even if that miner will follow the hash power majority come Nov. 15) should start using BIP135 to vote for the features it supports.

A vote for a feature is basically saying ‘I like the feature, but I want a different activation mechanism.’”

BIP135 Voting, Grace Periods, and Bitcoin SV

Stone further detailed that if there is a significant amount of votes showing a majority consensus then they should stop the November fork or start BIP135 activation.

The engineer continues by explaining that people don’t have to run BU to vote on these features as miners can set the BIP135 bits in their block version fields using mining pool software.

Following these statements, a BCH community member asked the programmer if the BIP135 system enabled the features automatically.