We Are Finally Reviewing Again - This week in Bitcoin Core #38
This week there was a PR review club after a long time...
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.
This week, there was finally another PR review club. The last review club was done in October of 2025. This one was for Testing Bitcoin Core 31.0 Release Candidates. In the IRC meeting, the goal was to build and run v31.0rc2 of Bitcoin Core. For every release of Bitcoin Core, there is a Release Candidate Testing Guide, which was used in the meeting.
Overall, the meeting went smoothly, and there were no major issues that were raised. Thanks to everyone who participated!
Merged PR’s
Every week, several changes are officially added to Bitcoin Core. This week, 24 changes were merged. Here are some I thought were interesting from this week.
Replace boost signals with minimal compatible implementation by Cory Fields
This change is one to help reduce the use of the boost dependency for bitcoind. In this change, the use of boost was reduced to boost::multi_index. This change is part of the v32.0 milestone, and hopefully, bitcoind can eventually remove its reliance on boost entirely.
This change implemented a minimal compatible version of boost signals in src/btcsignals.h that bitcoind uses. This ultimately will be the replacement.
From my perspective, this feels like a part of a larger effort to remove most dependencies from bitcoind. As I will continue to talk about in the next pull request that was merged.torcontrol: Remove libevent usage by Fabian Jahr
Another dependency removal project is also underway. As I had mentioned in a previous edition of “This Week in Bitcoin Core” there is a new working group dedicated to removing the libevent dependency from bitcoind.
In the pull request, it was removing the libevent usage from torcontrol, specifically, it replaces the libevent-based async I/O with blocking I/O utilizing the existingSockandCThreadInterrupt.Follow this link if you want to keep track of the progress of the libevent removal changes. From what I see, 3 more PRs are waiting to be merged, and a draft PR tracking what it would look like if it were completely removed today.
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: add include_change parameter to listtransactions by alfonsoromanz
Currently,
listtransactionssilently hides transactions whose outputs go exclusively to change addresses. This can be confusing, as reported in #34632: a user created a consolidation transaction sending funds to a change address, and the transaction disappeared fromlisttransactions, making it appear as though funds were lost.listsinceblockalready supports aninclude_changeparameter for this purpose. The internalListTransactionshelper also already accepts it. This PR simply wires the parameter through thelisttransactionsRPC handler for consistency.
IRC meeting notes
Every week on Thursday, there is an IRC meeting. Here are some short notes from that meeting.
<abubakarsadiq> #topic Fuzzing WG Update (dergoegge)
<dergoegge> Not much to say but we published a second blog post about fuzzamoto: https://brink.dev/blog/2026/04/09/fuzzamoto-non-determinism/<abubakarsadiq> #topic Net Split WG Update (cfields)
<cfields> I just pushed #35040. It’s move-only. please have a look :)
<abubakarsadiq> Nice. Is that it?
<cfields> 👍<abubakarsadiq> #topic Libevent removal (pinheadmz, fjahr)
<pinheadmz> hello
<pinheadmz> From fjahr: “#34158 was merged. Now my only PR left on this project is #34342 and since it depended on some changes from #34905, which was also merged, I was now able to take it out of draft status and it’s ready for review. It has some small parts shared with #32061 but I have decoupled it for now to allow for independent review.”
<pinheadmz> And for me, now that #34905 was merged, next PR is #34772 which currently has 2 ACKs. Then I can rebase #32061 (removing the first 7 commits) and address the feedback there from hodlinator and vasild.
<pinheadmz> and thats all for us !
<cfields> 🚀
<dzxzg> Very cool<abubakarsadiq> #topic QML GUI WG Update (johnny9dev)
<johnny9dev> focused on external signer support this week. I have configuration and wallet creation and working through getting signing setup in the send flow.
<johnny9dev> epicleafies: any status?
<epicleafies> was out of town, planning on working on another uri issue and fixing up previous PRs
<johnny9dev> thanks, that is all<abubakarsadiq> #topic Kernel WG Update (sedited)
<cfields> I believe he’s still away
<abubakarsadiq> sedited is not here, but I pushed #35000, to add unit + fuzz test for block validity, motivation and other details are in description.
<abubakarsadiq> That’s it from me. I don’t think there is any kernel-related update.<abubakarsadiq> #topic Benchmarking WG Update (l0rinc, andrewtoth)
<l0rinc> #34208 was merged, from now on we can make a few benchmarks more realistic by excluding the expensive setup times from the measurements.
<l0rinc> A follow-up was pushed to #35025 and #32554 was rebased.
<l0rinc> #34124 was also rebased after the change, it’s ready for review again.
<l0rinc> That’s it from me.
<abubakarsadiq> Nice
<andrewtoth_> no update from meReleases
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