We're pleased to announce 0.8.1, named by @vasild (who last release was a new committer!)

Despite the holiday break and Rusty's month off, commit numbers are only down 20%!

Highlights for Users

• We now support gifting msat to the peer when opening a channel, via push_msat, providing a brand new way to lose money!
• Invoice routehints can be overridden using exposeprivatechannels: try setting to [] to eliminate all of them to fit your invoice in twitter messages!
• Wallet withdraw transactions now set nLocktime, making them blend in more with other wallets.
• Preliminary support for plugins hooks which can replace the default bitcoin-cli with other blockchain querying methods (API may change in future releases though!).
• listforwards now records the outgoing short_channel_id, even if it wasn't possible to start forwarding.

Highlights for the Network

• Plugins can set additional feature bits, for more experimentation.
• More than one plugin can register for the htlc_accepted hook: others will become multi-user in future releases.
• Documentation updates, which had lagged recent changes.
• Prevent a case where grossly unbalanced channels could become unusable.

More details can be found in https://github.com/ElementsProject/lightning/blob/v0.8.1/CHANGELOG.md

Thanks to everyone for their contributions and bug reports; please keep them coming!

Since 0.8.0 we've had 257 commits from 17 different authors, with 5 first-time contributors!

• Niklas Claesson @NickeZ
• @minidisk1147
• Ken Sedgwick @ksedgwic
• Zoe Faltibà @zoedberg
• Glen Cooper @GlenCooper

Cheers, Rusty, Lisa, Christian, and ZmnSCPxj.

• live-common now depends on isomorphic-ws and axios and userland no longer have to setNetwork.
• Better documentation
• Fixes apps logic and introduce more hooks to be used by desktop and mobile
• Fixes balanceHistory reconciliation
• Support of an incoming more performant node bindings of libcore
• Introduces starred in Account model.
• Fixes libcore error remapping.
• Merge TRON complete support.
• Improve Firmware Update logic to support MCU updates.
• Drop unused capabilities field in ChildAccount.
• Drop apps polyfill (was used in early implementation of Manager v2 poc)

CLI

• introduces appsCheckAllAppVersions command

• update node-hid
• release of @ledgerhq/hw-app-trx TRON app bindings

• emit "responsive" event when device awakes https://github.com/LedgerHQ/ledgerjs/pull/460
• release of a new transport @ledgerhq/hw-transport-node-speculos for https://github.com/LedgerHQ/speculos https://github.com/LedgerHQ/ledgerjs/pull/458

This marks the first minor release in the v0.9.0 series. As this is a minor release, no major features are included in this release, but a number of important bug fixes are present. These bug fixes should eliminate the current known instance of erroneous force closes between nodes, optimize invoice expiry for larger nodes, and fix some accounting issues related to estimating the correct amount of available balance when forwarding.

Verifying the Release

In order to verify the release, you'll need to have gpg or gpg2 installed on your system. Once you've obtained a copy (and hopefully verified that as well), you'll first need to import the keys that have signed this release if you haven't done so already:

curl https://keybase.io/roasbeef/pgp_keys.asc | gpg --import

Once you have the required PGP keys, you can verify the release (assuming manifest-v0.9.1-beta.rc1.txt and manifest-v0.9.1-beta.rc1.txt.sig are in the current directory) with:

gpg --verify manifest-v0.9.1-beta.rc1.txt.sig

You should see the following if the verification was successful:

gpg: assuming signed data in 'manifest-v0.9.1-beta.rc1.txt'
gpg: Signature made Thu Feb 20 20:38:37 2020 PST
gpg:                using RSA key 4AB7F8DA6FAEBB3B70B1F903BC13F65E2DC84465
gpg: Good signature from &#34;Olaoluwa Osuntokun <laolu32@gmail.com>&#34; [ultimate]

That will verify the signature of the manifest file, which ensures integrity and authenticity of the archive you've downloaded locally containing the binaries. Next, depending on your operating system, you should then re-compute the sha256 hash of the archive with shasum -a 256 <filename>, compare it with the corresponding one in the manifest file, and ensure they match exactly.

Verifying the Release Binaries

Our release binaries are fully reproducible. Third parties are able to verify that the release binaries were produced properly without having to trust the release manager(s). See our reproducible builds guide for how this can be achieved. The release binaries are compiled with go1.13.7, which is required by verifiers to arrive at the same ones. They include the following build tags: autopilotrpc, signrpc, walletrpc, chainrpc, invoicesrpc, routerrpc, and watchtowerrpc. Note that these are already included in the release script, so they do not need to be provided.

Finally, you can also verify the tag itself with the following command:

git verify-tag v0.9.0-beta

Building the Contained Release

Users are able to rebuild the target release themselves without having to fetch any of the dependencies. In order to do so, assuming that vendor.tar.gz and lnd-source-v0.9.1-beta.rc1.tar.gz are in the current directory, follow these steps:

tar -xvzf vendor.tar.gz
tar -xvzf lnd-source-v0.9.1-beta.rc1.tar.gz
GO111MODULE=on go install -v -mod=vendor -ldflags "-X github.com/lightningnetwork/lnd/build.Commit=v0.9.1-beta" ./cmd/lnd
GO111MODULE=on go install -v -mod=vendor -ldflags "-X github.com/lightningnetwork/lnd/build.Commit=v0.9.1-beta" ./cmd/lncli

The -mod=vendor flag tells the go build command that it doesn't need to fetch the dependencies, and instead, they're all enclosed in the local vendor directory.

Additionally, it's now possible to use the enclosed release.sh script to bundle a release for a specific system like so:

LNDBUILDSYS="linux-arm64 darwin-amd64" ./build/release/release.sh

⚡️⚡️⚡️ OK, now to the rest of the release notes! ⚡️⚡️⚡️

Release Notes

RPC Configuration

A new flag (--tlsautorefresh) has been added to instruct lnd to re-generate TLS certs if the certs on disk differ from the specified configuration options. An example would be if you add a new TLS domain, but the certs on disk only have localhost as a valid domain for the cert.

We've updated a config on our end to ensure all default values are ALWAYS emitted when using the REST interface. As an example, if the field "f" wasn't set, rather than omitting it in our response, we'll emit: "f": false".

Peer to Peer Gossip

We'll now send blank response if a peer sends us a request for channels on a different chain than we advertise.

Invoice Handling

A bug has been fixed that would result in a deadlock with the invoice managing sub-system on a rare occasion.

Batch invoice expiry has been optimized for larger nodes. Before this change, very large nodes (10s of thousands of invoices) may have witnessed very slow start up if they just upgraded to this new version, or had a large number of invoices expire while they were offline.

Wallet

A bug has been fixed in the wallet where rescans would include more addresses that actually necessary. This would result in slower times to readiness for larger nodes, and also trigger an increased amount of false positives for neutrinos nodes.

Channel State Machine

A number of accounting related fixes have been made to the channel state machine. With these fixes, we'll now more accurately estimate the types of HTLCs that the commitment transaction can carry, properly factoring in things like the added cost of an HTLC, the reserve, and asymmetric dust values across commitments. User affected by this bug might've seen weird retry loops when path finding due to not properly recoding the "available balance" in one's commitment transaction. This bug fixes also preps us for payment splitting, as balance will run lower as we're able to utilize multiple channels to make a single payment.

We now perform stricter accounting w.r.t the maximum number of HTLCs allowed in a single commitment transaction.

A series of fixes in our unit tests will now properly exercise expected behavior between other implementations.

A bug that would at times causes a de-sync that would lead to an inadvertent force close between lnd nodes, and also other implementations.

On-Chain Contract Handling

A new config option has been added to allow mobile clients to give their connected parties a chance to settle/fail an HTLC before we go to chain. This new config option takes the form of --payments-expiration-grace-period=T, where T is a "duration" (1s, 5s, 5m, 5h, etc). Developers deploying lnd for mobile applications may want to set this value as they see fit, if their users are reporting frequent channel force closes due to intermittent connectivity.

Changelog

The full list of changes since v0.9.0-beta can be found here:

• https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lnd/compare/v0.9.0-beta...v0.9.1-beta.rc1

Contributors (Alphabetical Order)

Andras Banki-Horvath Eugene Seigel Johan T. Halseth Joost Jager Olaoluwa Osuntokun Oliver Gugger Roei Erez Wilmer Paulino /laolu32@gmail.com