There has been debate and conversation regarding the Bitcoin Core version numbers for quite some time. There are many options and schemes for a software project’s version numbers and most people have felt the need to drop the leading 0 from the (current) version release of Bitcoin Core 0.15.1. The leading 0 can give the appearance that the project is still in a beta stage and not in production. That could not be further from reality and the decision has been made to finally update the version number.

This PR paves the way for the upcoming version scheme change for Bitcoin Core.