Putting things in memory - This Week in Bitcoin Core #51
This week we are putting things in memory ...
Hello 👋 folks, I’m Kevkevin. I’m an open-source developer and reporter for Insider Edition. Last week, I reviewed several pull requests from the Bitcoin Core repo.
A new release candidate of Bitcoin Core has been pushed out. Go out there and give it a test!
Merged PR’s
Every week, several changes are officially added to Bitcoin Core. This week, multiple changes were merged. Here are some I found interesting this week.
wallet: Use in-memory SQLite for temporary wallet in exportwatchonlywallet by pablomartin4btc
Why would you want to do any on disk operations if you knew that some info would be deleted shortly after an operation? This was the motivation for this PR. pablomartin4btc wanted to change the exportwatchonlywallet RPC to put the intermediate wallet built during its operation from being put on disk to directly in memory.
This gives Bitcoin Core a few benefits. Firstly, it is faster, and faster is always better, because we do not need to read from disk anymore, and we can instead read from memory operations run quicker. Secondly, making it all in memory makes it so we don’t need thecleanup_watchonly_walletRAII handler anymore, thus simplifying the code.
Overall, this change makes the code more efficient and simplifies things for future contributors.kernel: expose witness stack and scriptSig for btck_TransactionInput by pzafonte
Silent payments scanning needs the public key from every input. For SegWit inputs it is in the witness stack. For P2PKH inputs it is in scriptSig. Without these new functions, callers must deserialize the raw transaction themselves to reach that data, which is difficult and error-prone.
Introduces abtck_WitnessStacktype and adds the following functions: btck_transaction_input_get_witness_stack, btck_witness_stack_count_items, btck_witness_stack_get_item_at, btck_witness_stack_copy/btck_witness_stack_destroy, btck_transaction_input_get_script_sig
There are always changes being updated and reviewed in real-time. Here are some notable PR’s that are still up and looking for reviews.
wallet: rpc: Deprecate removeprunedfunds RPC by davidgumberg
Originally added in #7558 as a companion to importprunedfunds, this RPC has no known helpful use while being both dangerous and a maintenance burden. Despite what the name says, it allows the deletion of arbitrary transactions, and importprunedfunds does not allow the importing of transactions not belonging to the user, and listtransactions does not list transactions not belonging to the wallet, so this RPC can only be used to delete transactions actually belonging to the wallet, and in the unlikely event that transactions not belonging to the wallet are present, they cause no harm except for occupying a few bytes on the users disk.
IRC meeting notes
Every week on Thursday, there is an IRC meeting. Here are some short notes from that meeting.
--- Topic 1 ---
stickies-v: #topic Benchmarking WG Update (l0rinc, andrewtoth)
l0rinc: hi
andrewtoth: Just wanted to say thanks to everyone who helped in any way to get #35295 across the finish line. That's all.
lightlike: hi
l0rinc: nothing urgent from me, thanks
stickies-v: i've seen a lot of people talk about the speedups on twitter!
--- Topic 2 ---
stickies-v: #topic QML GUI WG Update (johnny9dev)
l0rinc: (just finished a reindex chainstate for https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/35215 in 3 hours on one of my servers by the way :D)
johnny9dev: Updated https://bitcoincore.app/ with permanent links to our latest preview builds.
johnny9dev: Will be sharing it increasingly with more people to get feedback and help hunt down bugs
johnny9dev: that's all for now
stickies-v: giving it a go now 👍
--- Topic 3 ---
stickies-v: #topic QA WG Update (brunoerg)
stickies-v: brunoerg shared his update right before the meeting: https://www.erisian.com.au/bitcoin-core-dev/log-2026-07-16.html#l-178
stickies-v: that's it for the WG updates today. Anything else to discuss?Read here for the full meeting
Releases
Thank you for reading. Be sure to tune in again next week for your updates on Bitcoin Core!
If there are any comments, suggestions, or errors, do not hesitate to reach out or comment