Bitcoin Core, the software that powers the Bitcoin network, has released its latest version 26.0, which introduces a variety of new features and improvements to increase the security and performance of the network.
One of the most notable changes is the introduction of experimental support for the v2 transport protocol, which aims to increase the privacy and reliability of peer-to-peer connections.
The v2 transport protocol defined in BIP324 is a new way to encrypt and authenticate messages exchanged between BTC nodes. This protocol was designed to prevent “man-in-the-middle attacks”, reduce bandwidth usage, and enable future protocol extensions. The V2 transport protocol is turned off by default, but users can enable it using the -v2transport option.
A man-in-the-middle attack can be defined as a form of cyber attack in which an attacker secretly intercepts and modifies communications between two parties who think they are talking directly to each other.
Another important change is increasing network diversity. Nodes with multiple accessible networks, such as IPv4, IPv6, Tor, or I2P, will actively attempt to have at least one outgoing connection to each network. This increases individual resistance to eclipse attacks, where an attacker isolates a node from the rest of the network, and network-level resistance to partitioning attacks, where an attacker divides the network into two or more subnets.
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