This week in Bitcoin Core

Bitcoin Core contributor kevkevin covers some of the latest updates...

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. Here’s what I found notable.

Merged PR’s

Every week, several changes are officially added to Bitcoin Core. This week, 12 changes were merged. Here are some I thought were interesting from this week.

• build: Drop support for EOL macOS 13 by maflcko

  Mac OS 13 is now marked for end of life, so it does not make sense to support it in Bitcoin Core anymore. This change updates anywhere we are using macOS 13 or lower and bumps the version. This also results in a bump to the lowest Xcode version to 16.
  
  There have also been some precautions to update in some places to version 15 instead of 14 to avoid end of life for Mac OS 14 in the next year.

• ci: remove 3rd party js from windows dll gha job by m3dwards

  This change removes an external dependency ilammy/msvc-dev-cmd, which runs JavaScript (ideally, we would not want to run JS). Instead now that dependency is removed and vswhere.exe is used in its place to find those tools and create a dev cmd prompt.

• Bump SCRIPT_VERIFY flags to 64 bit by ajtowns

  This change was because as of today 21 of the possible 32 bits for SCRIPT_VERIFY_* have been used and it makes sense to extend this to 64 now. ajtowns also created a dedicated script type so in the future this is also easier to upgrade.

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Open PR’s

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.

• Fix windows libc++ fs::path fstream compile errors by ryanofsky

Drop support for passing fs::path directly to std::ifstream and std::ofstream constructors and open() functions, because as reported by hebasto in #33545, after https://wg21.link/lwg3430 there is no way this can continue to work in windows builds, and there are already compile errors compiling for windows with newer versions of libc++.

Instead, add an fs::path::std_path() method that returns std::filesystem::path references and use it where needed.

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IRC meeting notes

Every week on Thursday, there is an IRC meeting. Here are some short notes from that meeting.

• Kernel WG Update (TheCharlatan)

  • TheCharlatan: Review has been coming in on #30595, which is great to see. So far this has not triggered any additional major changes. Also got some more people to test it out for various prototypes, and feedback so far has been positive. asking for even more people to look at it :)

• Cluster Mempool WG Update (sdaftuar, sipa)

  • sipa: Getting some good review on #33157 (thanks l0rinc and glozow), which I’m addressing, and will push soon. I think it’s pretty close otherwise. sdaftuar and i are doing some more simulation work on figuring out the optimality of block building, and how far off we are; i posted about it on https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/28676#issuecomment-3362136518, but will post more graphs soon

• MuSig2 WG Update (achow101)

  • achow101: #29675 has been getting review which I’ve been addressing. It’s got 3 ACKs now so I think it’s probably rfm.

• Releases

  • achow101: v30.0rc3 is up, and the tag for final is scheduled for tomorrow. Have any new issues been found in testing?

  • glozow and cfields: review nag for #33577

For the full log, check the meeting in minutes

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Releases

• Bitcoin Core v30.0 has been scheduled to be tagged on Oct 10th, 2025 (today)

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Thank you for reading. Be sure to tune in again next week for your updates on Bitcoin Core!