1d334d830f
13161ecf03opt: Skip over barren combinations of tiny UTXOs (Murch)b7672c7cddopt: Skip checking max_weight separately (Murch)1edd2baa37opt: Cut if last addition was minimal weight (Murch)5248e2a60dopt: Skip heavier UTXOs with same effective value (Murch)9124c73742opt: Tiebreak UTXOs by weight for CoinGrinder (Murch)451be19dc1opt: Skip evaluation of equivalent input sets (Murch)407b1e3432opt: Track remaining effective_value in lookahead (Murch)5f84f3cc04opt: Skip branches with worse weight (Murch)d68bc74fb2fuzz: Test optimality of CoinGrinder (Murch)67df6c629afuzz: Add CoinGrinder fuzz target (Murch)1502231229coinselection: Track whether CG completed (Murch)7488acc646test: Add coin_grinder_tests (Murch)6cc9a46cd0coinselection: Add CoinGrinder algorithm (Murch)89d0956643opt: Tie-break UTXO sort by waste for BnB (Murch)aaee65823cdoc: Document max_weight on BnB (Murch) Pull request description: ***Please refer to the [topic on Delving Bitcoin](https://delvingbitcoin.org/t/gutterguard-and-coingrinder-simulation-results/279) discussing Gutter Guard/Coingrinder simulation results.*** Adds a coin selection algorithm that minimizes the weight of the input set while creating change. Motivations --- - At high feerates, using unnecessary inputs can significantly increase the fees - Users are upset when fees are relatively large compared to the amount sent - Some users struggle to maintain a sufficient count of UTXOs in their wallet Approach --- So far, Bitcoin Core has used a balanced approach to coin selection, where it will generate multiple input set candidates using various coin selection algorithms and pick the least wasteful among their results, but not explicitly minimize the input set weight. Under some circumstances, we _do_ want to minimize the weight of the input set. Sometimes changeless solutions require many or heavy inputs, and there is not always a changeless solution for Branch and Bound to find in the first place. This can cause expensive transactions unnecessarily. Given a wallet with sufficient funds, `CoinGrinder` will pick the minimal-waste input set for a transaction with a change output. The current implementation only runs `CoinGrinder` at feerates over 3×long-term-feerate-estimate (by default 30 ṩ/vB), which may be a decent compromise between our goal to reduce costs for the users, but still permit transactions at lower feerates to naturally reduce the wallet’s UTXO pool to curb bloat. Trade-offs --- Simulations for my thesis on coin selection ([see Section 6.3.2.1 [PDF]](https://murch.one/erhardt2016coinselection.pdf)) suggest that minimizing the input set for all transactions tends to grind a wallet’s UTXO pool to dust (pun intended): an approach selecting inputs per coin-age-priority (in effect similar to “largest first selection”) on average produced a UTXO pool with 15× the UTXO count as Bitcoin Core’s Knapsack-based Coin Selection then (in 2016). Therefore, I do not recommend running `CoinGrinder` under all circumstances, but only at extreme feerates or when we have another good reason to minimize the input set for other reasons. In the long-term, we should introduce additional metrics to score different input set candidates, e.g. on basis of their privacy and wallet health impact, to pick from all our coin selection results, but until then, we may want to limit use of `CoinGrinder` in other ways. ACKs for top commit: achow101: ACK13161ecf03sr-gi: ACK [13161ec](13161ecf03) sipa: ACK13161ecf03Tree-SHA512: 895b08b2ebfd0b71127949b7dba27146a6d10700bf8590402b14f261e7b937f4e2e1b24ca46de440c35f19349043ed2eba4159dc2aa3edae57721384186dae40
Bitcoin Core integration/staging tree
For an immediately usable, binary version of the Bitcoin Core software, see https://bitcoincore.org/en/download/.
What is Bitcoin Core?
Bitcoin Core connects to the Bitcoin peer-to-peer network to download and fully validate blocks and transactions. It also includes a wallet and graphical user interface, which can be optionally built.
Further information about Bitcoin Core is available in the doc folder.
License
Bitcoin Core is released under the terms of the MIT license. See COPYING for more information or see https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT.
Development Process
The master branch is regularly built (see doc/build-*.md for instructions) and tested, but it is not guaranteed to be
completely stable. Tags are created
regularly from release branches to indicate new official, stable release versions of Bitcoin Core.
The https://github.com/bitcoin-core/gui repository is used exclusively for the development of the GUI. Its master branch is identical in all monotree repositories. Release branches and tags do not exist, so please do not fork that repository unless it is for development reasons.
The contribution workflow is described in CONTRIBUTING.md and useful hints for developers can be found in doc/developer-notes.md.
Testing
Testing and code review is the bottleneck for development; we get more pull requests than we can review and test on short notice. Please be patient and help out by testing other people's pull requests, and remember this is a security-critical project where any mistake might cost people lots of money.
Automated Testing
Developers are strongly encouraged to write unit tests for new code, and to
submit new unit tests for old code. Unit tests can be compiled and run
(assuming they weren't disabled in configure) with: make check. Further details on running
and extending unit tests can be found in /src/test/README.md.
There are also regression and integration tests, written
in Python.
These tests can be run (if the test dependencies are installed) with: test/functional/test_runner.py
The CI (Continuous Integration) systems make sure that every pull request is built for Windows, Linux, and macOS, and that unit/sanity tests are run automatically.
Manual Quality Assurance (QA) Testing
Changes should be tested by somebody other than the developer who wrote the code. This is especially important for large or high-risk changes. It is useful to add a test plan to the pull request description if testing the changes is not straightforward.
Translations
Changes to translations as well as new translations can be submitted to Bitcoin Core's Transifex page.
Translations are periodically pulled from Transifex and merged into the git repository. See the translation process for details on how this works.
Important: We do not accept translation changes as GitHub pull requests because the next pull from Transifex would automatically overwrite them again.